Mission

We inspire, connect, and engage Latino communities in the outdoors and embrace cultura y familia as part of the outdoor narrative, ensuring our history, heritage, and leadership are valued and represented.

The mission of Latino Outdoors (LO) is advanced through our three main programs by a team of dedicated volunteers and staff.

Team

The people who power Latino Outdoors include a national network of over 200 volunteers, a staff dedicated to supporting this network, a volunteer Advisory Board, and our Founder.

Vamos Outdoors (Let’s Go Outdoors)

This program is centered on fostering outdoor engagement for Latine and other communities through group outings, activities in collaboration with other organizations, initiatives that encourage independent outdoor participation, and sharing of safe and enjoyable practices in outdoor engagement through LO’s online communications channels. Activities are largely family-friendly and free for participants. They include hiking, camping, biking, birding, dancing, picnicking, piñata parties in the park, and more.

Latino Outdoors was founded in 2013 with outdoor programming beginning in earnest in 2014 (California’s Central Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles). Over the years, our national network of volunteers/leaders, now numbering more than 200 and present in over 30 locations spanning the U.S. from east to west, has delivered over 1,700 outings for more than 34,000 participants. More than half of that has taken place from 2023 onward. One of every four participants is a child or youth. Over 80% of LO outings include participants attending together with family members and nearly 80% include someone experiencing the activity for the first time.

Yo Cuento Outdoors (I Count/I Matter/I Tell a Story Outdoors)

The objective of LO’s program for storytelling, communications, and advocacy is to expand the collective narrative of outdoor engagement so that it is more rich and representative of the diverse community of people who love and care for the outdoors. Images, stories, and other content are shared on Latino Outdoors’ growing online communications platforms, which include social media channels with a current combined following of 121,000+ (and thousands more on LO’s regional social media channels) and on latinooutdoors.org, with more than 380,000 website visitors and nearly 1 million views.

Crecemos Outdoors (We Grow Outdoors)

Under this program, LO supports our volunteers (and broader community) with training and leadership development opportunities, networking spaces, and resources for advancing professionally.  Examples include sponsorship with wilderness first aid certification, other outdoor skills training, and access to our Jobs+ board of opportunities, where more than 7,000 jobs, internships, fellowships, and scholarships in outdoor-related fields have been shared.

Inter-Programmatic Synergy

The programmatic priorities of Latino Outdoors are: outdoor experiences, outdoor narratives, and outdoor leadership. Our three core programs complement each other; the success of one elevates the others. Vamos Outdoors fosters outdoor engagement, which leads to personal stories of connection to the outdoors. Those stories are amplified through Yo Cuento Outdoors, reaching wider audiences and inspiring new and renewed outdoor engagement. In turn, Vamos program participants and Yo Cuento audience members often become inspired to join LO’s volunteer network, where they have the opportunity to develop their outdoor leadership capacity through Crecemos Outdoors, while contributing to the impact of Vamos and Yo Cuento Outdoors.