“Through sailing and outdoor education, Wind Warriors builds a community — where individuals with disabilities and youth facing challenges — find the thrill of adventure, the joy of belonging, and the courage to lead.”
For over 20 years, our mission is to improve the health, education and independence of people with physical, developmental, social and economic challenges through the sport of sailing and leadership education. By blending outdoor recreation, community building and overcoming barriers, we create opportunities for people of all abilities to connect, thrive and lead.
People with disabilities long for the same things as anybody: leisure, social connection and the chance to participate fully in life. Our participants gain confidence, fitness, and independence through sailing and leadership. Along the way, they challenge perceptions, break down barriers and inspire communities to embrace a broader vision of human potential.
Wind Warriors is a vibrant and welcoming community. We create space for personal fulfillment and leadership development. Whether on the water or in the heart of their communities, participants discover new strengths and build lasting relationships where no one gets left behind.
Our communities and the outdoors are more than a backdrop—it’s a platform for building a more welcoming and sustainable world where everyone can chart their own course.
Voyages Unbound was founded in 1998. Since 1999, Voyages Unbound is a nonprofit leadership training platform that uses experiential education; engages adventure in the outdoors; focuses on reconciling and bridging different cultures and people; and is committed to empowering people who are on the margins.
In 2005 Voyages Unbound launched the Sailing Club at Arizona State University with an active adaptive sailing component. Twenty years later, they are a thriving club sport at ASU that is committed to community service. However, the club was more focused on intercollegiate and regional competition than adaptive sailing at this point and discontinued the adaptive sailing component.
In 2025, Voyages Unbound is relaunching its adaptive sailing, youth leadership and water sports training with a program called Wind Warriors. The service leadership model is core to both adaptive sailing and vulnerable youth leadership training. They have an emphasis on strong people and communities being led by ordinary people who lead by example.
Wind Warriors, a Voyages Unbound program, continues to develop a network of community partners, to share their expertise and resources with individuals in need and strengthen Voyages Unbound reputation nationally.
Voyages Unbound was the recipient of the Arizona Partners in Education for its afterschool Leadership through Sailing program. Soon after it was awarded the Top Community Sailing Award, by US Sailing.
In the years to come, Jack and Jake want to innovate new models and programs that empower people with disabilities and youth in global cultures and communities.
In 1998, Jack Oppenhuizen conceived of a leadership training organization after he returned from working overseas and was mentoring student leaders at Arizona State University (ASU).
He recognized that ASU had the largest population of students with disabilities of any university in the US. He began teaching a leadership course for both able-bodied students and soon included those with disabilities.
He found that he could teach leadership content on a sailboat far more effectively in the tradition of experiential education. The sailboat became a dynamic floating lab that amplified students’ performance and interaction with each other.
Experiential education and modifying sailboats for people with disabilities became foundational to leveling the playing field for students with disabilities (including those with paralysis, CP, MS, and those who were blind).
Jack wrote the curriculum to teach leadership development with transferable principles and life-skills from the sport of sailing. He first began by modifying Catalina 22’ Sailboats.
After several years, a Canadian retired engineer bumped into Jack in a scrapyard for metal, hunting down airplane grade aluminum to fabricate into parts. Graham was also retrofitting boats for sailors with disabilities in Calgary, Canada. He was a few steps ahead.
Jack and Graham’s friendship took off swiftly. Jack picked up Graham and headed for the water with sandwiches and a cookie from Bernice, Graham’s wife.
Graham and his son Steve worked with Don Martin, the famous designer of Dennis Conner’s Americas Cup sailboat, to empower anyone with a disability to fully sail solo. Together, they designed and manufactured the fully accessible Martin 16 sailboat.
After a lot of time sailing together as friends, Jack bought two Martin 16 sailboats from Graham and the Canadian Disabled Sailing Association. He imported the boat to be sailed in the desert winds of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. This enabled Voyages Unbound to empower sailors with quadriplegia to sail on the newly filled Tempe Town Lake and other regional lakes.
At point, Jack balanced himself on a trash heap hunting scrap metal, an executive car drove up. A distinguished man in a blue suit stepped out and put on a yellow helmet on his head.
His voice commanded attention. “Are you Jack?” When he had full attention he continued, “I am the Vice President of Metal Management based in Chicago. I have heard about you and your work to change communities through people with disabilities. I have heard about the sailboats you are fabricating and retrofitting. I came here to tell you this…. We are in the same business. Our company recycles metal. But you recycle hope through people’s lives!”
Jake Geller moved to Tempe AZ to attend ASU. Soon after he arrived, a news article was written about Jake’s adventurous mindset and his parents who were instrumental in adaptive skiing being established in New England. Jake’s family had the “All for one and one for all” approach to family life.
Jake was immersed in adaptive skiing, ocean swimming and all kinds of recreation. He didn’t allow his Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy to stop him. So, when Jack and Jake met, he said yes to an opportunity to learn to sail.
Jack taught Jake to sail and then he taught him to coach. Together, Jack and Jake founded the Sailing Club at ASU. After several years, Jake took the helm and coached the ASU Sailing team for the next 18 years.
About the time that Jack and Jake met, a new lake was opening because of technology that enabled a dam to be built in the Salt River. The Tempe Town Lake became the central location for water sports, concerts, Iron Man triathlons and many festivals. Up until that point, Jack arranged for transportation of ASU students to Lake Pleasant.
Jack’s first students were all blind. He taught them wind direction, points of sail, and how to feel the hull speed. They learned how to sail faster than the able-bodied students in the cohort. The new Tempe Town Lake meant that students and community members were able to quickly access the lake.
Voyages Unbound’s programs operated out of two 40-foot shipping containers on the side of Tempe Town Lake before there was even a Tempe Town Lake Marina. Jack and Jake worked extensively with the City of Tempe to put in physical walkways, curb cuts, ramps, accessible docks, shade structures for students with paralysis and Hoyer lifts into the docks.
Voyages Unbound’s afterschool Leadership Trough Sports identified that their cohorts were most effective when a third of the students being disabled, a third of the students were from at-risk circumstances and the final third of the students were upwardly mobile leadership students. That became a hallmark design signature of Voyages Unbound’s leadership programs.
School districts across the Valley began inquiring how they could have a Leadership Trough Sailing program. Yellow school buses began to arrive at the new lake with students in wheelchairs as well as refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The outcome of the students learning leadership and life skills outdoors in an experiential education was that all the graduates of the program returned to their schools and families as leaders with confidence to bring about positive change.
In 2005, Voyages Unbound spun off the ASU Sailing Team, transferring boats and adaptive equipment to ASU’s Sailing Club, so that Jake could operate and coach the team.
Jack began working to build capacity of disability organizations in developing countries. The injustice, oppression, and poverty among people with disabilities is extreme. Jack also started other similar Leadership Though Sport programming for vulnerable populations in many locations globally.
Back at ASU, there are generations of college students that learned to value people with disabilities because they saw Jake’s capability as a coach and leader. It caused them to reflect upon their own lives, go after their dreams and advocate for people with disabilities.