LU senior uses unique degree combination to provide wilderness therapy

Meet Taylor Craig. She goes to Golf Park Coffee Co. on the weekends, takes long drives down the Blue Ridge Parkway and always has a car full of camping and climbing gear. Taylor is a senior in the social work department at Liberty University with a minor in Camp and Outdoor Adventure Leadership (COAL) and dreams of combining the two in the niche of wilderness therapy. 

Adopted as a baby, Taylor had a very early introduction into the world of social work that continued throughout her childhood as her mom and family worked with adoption services and social work programs and ministries. 

“Growing up I always said I would never do social work, which is just kind of funny how the Lord works,” Taylor said. “Throughout my whole life, I’ve just seen the hand of the Lord leading me to where I am today.”

Taylor’s upbringing was a typical American story. Summer camps every summer as well as hiking and camping with her family on the weekends – it was a quintessential youth.

Looking back, her journey seems incredibly linear, yet it was only through a last-minute decision 24 hours before freshman year began that led her to chose social work.

“I was praying about my semester and over my schedule, and I just got this deep sense of unease, which is how the Lord usually speaks to me,” Taylor said. “So I dropped all my classes, changed my schedule, and changed my major to social work because I just knew that the Lord had given me my story for a reason.” 

Taylor has only recently found her niche during her senior field placement at a wilderness therapeutic boarding school. This gave her hands-on practice with at-risk youth within a wilderness setting where they cooked all their food over fires, cut down trees, held therapy sessions next to a campfire and slept outside.

“I saw so much practical change in these girls’ lives, whether it was self-discipline, self-control (or) anger management,” Taylor said. “In my one semester of being there, some of the girls, by the time I left, had such radical life change, and the girls are required to be there for at least a year and a half so that those patterns can be ingrained into their behavior.”

Taylor credits her journey and her hopeful future to all of her summers at camp. 

“That’s when I kind of fell in love with serving people,” Taylor said. “I’d do dishes for hours and I’d take up the trash and I’d scrub tables and floors and I’d do it for free, because if there’s no clean plates to eat off of, how can kids hear the Gospel at camp?” 

After graduation, Taylor looks forward to using her unique degree combination to blaze new trails in the world of wilderness therapy. 

“I’ve found a way to combine my love of outdoor education and social work together to create this really unique, niche mesh of the vulnerability that the unpredictability of the wilderness brings out in people,” Taylor said.  

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