About Rooted Life Adventures
Silly, messy, fun is so good for you
Our Mission:
We put the fun back in mental health support. At Rooted Life Adventures, our mission is to provide a transformative experience through international adventures, cultural immersion, volunteering, internships, and group living. Participants gain essential life skills while living in a supportive environment with a dedicated Wellness Coach offering in-the-moment coaching and therapeutic support.
We believe in making extraordinary adventures accessible to “kids who have been through hard.” We help them develop a sense of self, belonging, capability, and purpose. Our program emphasizes love, laughter, messy fun, nature, and friendship. By prioritizing these things, personal development and mental well-being can happen naturally and joyfully.
Awards and Accreditation
Accredited by the Gap Year Association
Best Integrated Mental Health & Experiential Education Program
Innovation Award in Accessibility
Meet the People Behind Rooted Life Adventures
Austin Rogers,
Founder & Executive Director
Mechi Von Der Becke,
Operations Director
Our Story
Rooted Life Adventures started long before it had a name.
Austin grew up watching someone she loved struggle to find his place in the world. Her brother’s autism shaped her family in profound ways, and she watched her mom spend years doing what so many parents do—loving fiercely, advocating constantly, searching for resources, and trying to find places where her child could belong.
Austin saw firsthand what it looks like when an incredible person doesn’t fit neatly into the options the world has created for them.
Years later, after graduating from Baylor University with a degree in International Studies, Austin found her way into gap year education. Over the next several years, she worked with hundreds of young people and their families around the world. She saw how powerful adventure, community, travel, challenge, and experiential learning could be. Take a young person somewhere completely new, surround them with a small group of people, give them real responsibilities and incredible adventures, and something happens. They discover parts of themselves they couldn’t find sitting in a classroom or talking about who they wanted to become.
But she also kept seeing the same gap. There were incredible travel programs for highly independent young people. There were intensive therapeutic programs for young people who needed significant clinical support.
And then there were all these kids in the middle.
Smart, funny, interesting, capable kids. Kids who had been through hard. Kids whose brains worked a little differently. Kids with anxiety, ADHD, executive-function challenges, school struggles, or simply a few difficult years behind them. They needed some support—but they also desperately needed friends, adventure, laughter, independence, responsibility, sunshine, and a chance to discover what they could do.
Austin knew those kids. And she knew their parents, too. So she decided to build the program she wished existed for them.
Small on Purpose
Austin designed the model and built the first RLA program from the ground up. Not as a giant travel company designed to move as many students as possible, but as something deliberately small and deeply personal. RLA is still that way today.
We know our students. We know their parents. We know what they’re excited about, what they’re nervous about, what comes easily to them, and what takes a little more work.
Every student who joins RLA is someone we want to actually know. Because when you’re asking a family to trust you with one of the most precious people in their world, we think that matters.
...And Then There Were Two
Austin founded Rooted Life Adventures, but as RLA grew, Mechi gradually became part of what she was building—first helping behind the scenes, then taking on more and more, and eventually joining RLA full-time.
Today, Austin and Mechi run Rooted Life Adventures together—and they’re partners in life, too.
Austin dreams big. Mechi figures out how to make it happen. Together, they spend much of the year moving wherever RLA needs them. RLA may operate around the world, but it’s a small company run by two people who care enormously about getting this right.
Why We Teach Students to Dream
Building Rooted Life Adventures didn’t just give Austin a business. It gave her the life she had spent years trying to figure out how to build.
Work with purpose. A life filled with people she loves. The freedom to live around the world. And work she genuinely believes matters. That experience fundamentally changed the way Austin thought about purpose.
That’s one of the reasons entrepreneurship is woven into every RLA program. Not because we think every student should start a company.
Purpose:
Take what you love
+
what you’re good at
+
find a way to use it to benefit the world
Entrepreneurship teaches something much bigger: You can create things. You can solve problems. You can build opportunities. You can design a life instead of simply waiting for someone else to hand you a path.
We want our students to learn how to build community. How to dream. How to understand their own brain and develop strategies that work for them. How to take responsibility for their lives. How to discover what they love and what they’re good at, and imagine how those things might matter in the world.
We want them to leave more capable of dreaming up a life for themselves—and more capable of actually pursuing it.
There is one last belief we want every Rooted Life Adventures student to take home:
Everything is figure-out-able.
If you know that, you can build one hell of a life.
© 2025 Rooted Life Adventures Ltd. All Rights Reserved
