There’s even more to Grand Rapids than meets the eye, and the new activity-based venture
GR Scavenger Hunt wants to help you find it.
Created by local business owners Jill Wolfe and Carol Distel, GR Scavenger Hunt combines elements of games like photo hunts, trivia, and adventure races to bring participants a unique, competition-style challenge in the heart of the city’s downtown.
“It helps to think about Grand Rapids and the people and the places here,” says co-owner Jill Wolfe. “I usually start with the places downtown — whether it's The Calder, Fountain Street Church, Rosa Parks Circle, or the Grand River — and think about the challenges in a way that engages people with those places differently.”
GR Scavenger Hunt sends competing groups of 2-4 out into the city with treasure hunt checklists and trivia puzzles that typically take about 90 minutes to complete, costing around $20 a head for a private game for events like birthdays or bachelor/bachelorette parties, with a customized gift box from the locally-sourced
Boxed GR for first place winners.
Wolfe says GR Scavenger Hunt has already put on a few events for corporate groups as well, hosting past treasure hunts for groups like Greenstone Financial and Experience GR. For corporate events, they’ll show slideshows of the pictures taken by employees throughout the hunt at the end when they regroup at the meeting spot, which lately have been local establishments like Grand Rapids Brewing Co. and Bistro Bella Vita.
“With Greenstone, we created a whole list of things…questions like, ‘Find someone born in the year Greenstone was founded.’ Most of them had never been to Grand Rapids so that was fun,” Wolfe says. “We did a treasure hunt for Experience GR, for their team, and that was a little more difficult because they already know everything there is to know about Grand Rapids.”
She says they find ideas for new challenges everywhere, but have had a lot of help from the Grand Rapids Public Library, where librarians have helped them dig through old books and archives in the past.
“After our first meeting with Experience GR we headed straight for the Grand Rapids Library and the librarians there were very helpful and they pulled out a bunch of books,” she says. “We found a trivia test from like 20 years ago that was a goldmine of things that went on in Grand Rapids that people don’t really know much about or don’t remember.”
GR Scavenger Hunt is hosting a public event on Sept. 17 in downtown Grand Rapids, with limited spots for participants at $15 per person.
“It’ll just be a really eclectic set of people that don’t know each other and strangers competing against each other,” she says. “It’s the first public event we’re going to do, so it’s going to be mostly, ‘check off these lists,’ but I think it’ll be awesome and I’m excited to see who comes out.”
The group will also offer a free, downloadable scavenger hunt on its website during ArtPrize 2015, but will still be open to host custom private hunts for both corporate groups and others who want to explore the three-week event from a new perspective.
“ArtPrize is Grand Rapids, in a lot of ways, and we want to make it more enjoyable for people who maybe don’t pay attention to art very much for the rest of the year and help them get more engaged with ArtPrize at a level of interest that might not be there initially,” she says.
“I think that Carol and I are just super passionate about Grand Rapids. It’s a great downtown and it's in the middle of a renascence,” Wolfe says. “To be able to interact with the people — that’s, I’ll be honest, one of the best parts of this. The people we interact with have been nothing but helpful and engaged and happy to participate. It’s been really great to see everyone come together and engage in ways they probably wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
Click here to sign up for the Sept. 17 public event, or to learn more about
GR Scavenger Hunt, visit www.grscavengerhunt.com.
By Anya Zentmeyer, Development News Editor
Images courtesy of GR Scavenger Hunt
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