[LorenPechtel]

Start small and go with people who are more experienced--inexperienced people should not be in the backcountry alone! For complete novices I would suggest looking on Meetup for hiking groups, start out with the shortest stuff they offer.

The short stuff also has the advantage that your costs are minimal. You likely have most everything you would need except possibly a pack and pretty much anything will do for a short hike. The people doing the trails on that list will generally have basically everything they're carrying (other than consumables) being high-end stuff specifically for hikers/backpackers. Consider the highest mountain locally--at the trailheads you see plenty of people in anything, even a decent number simply carrying a water bottle and that's it. On the summit (a long hike, no mountaineering) I would say 90% of the gear I see is the good stuff.

Or consider an experience from last year--we got a last-minute message from the leader, she had car trouble and couldn't get there. We were supposed to be six, but one new person failed to find us at the trailhead so four of us set off. It was dusk when we left, soon turning to night, and without our leader we definitely had some pathfinding problems. We were all glad the new woman didn't find us--we were all experienced, the fact that we were out at night in the desert and didn't know where the trail was was of no concern to us (we could see civilization and there wasn't any substantial obstacle to simply heading for it) we were thinking about how she would have reacted to the situation.