Founded in 2007 by Simon Dean, a Cadet Force Company Commander with 30 years military experience, we are proud to have tripled in size in just five years.
Starting out with teams in East and West Kent, we now also cover Bromley, South East London and Cheshire (with outreach to Lancashire), with West Kent also now outreaching to East Sussex. Not content to rest on our laurels, we are also working on plans for future development in other areas.
In our first five years, we have been busy – working with 5,000 young people aged 8-18 in over 30 two-week cadet camps, 300 residential weekends and eight overseas long-haul youth expeditions, whilst simultaneously fundraising over £12,000 for military charities. We are excitedly planning our next awards ceremony for students who have completed their courses which takes place on December 6th in Maidstone, where there will be special guests and VIPs to help us celebrate our fifth anniversary.
Challenger Troop was born out of Simon’s success running outreach programmes as an ACF officer with the Kent Army Cadet Force. As a result of this, Kent County Council asked if he could run curriculum-based full-time programmes in schools, so in 2007 Challenger Troop came into being.
As Simon says, “We work with a military ethos, offering the same level of training and self-development, but we are independent of the military, and as such, can offer more personalised development programmes calling on support and input from a variety of key organisations.”
This is a very exciting time for us and if you would like to know more about our work please sign up to receive our newsletter and if you would like to get involved, we would love to hear from you.
"Outdoor learning is giving them back their childhood wonder and curiosity at new things, allowing them to experience the marvel of discovery and the learning that comes from taking risks"
