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Tag: Latinas Outdoors

Celebrate Latino Conservation Week with Latino Outdoors

Por Christian La Mont

Latino Conservation Week: Disfrutando y Conservando Nuestra Tierra (LCW) is an initiative of the Hispanic Access Foundation and was created to support the Latinx community in getting into the outdoors and participating in activities to protect our natural resources. That’s the official overview. To me, LCW is a week-long celebration of conservation, cultura, and comunidad.

At Latino Outdoors (LO), it’s safe to say that we celebrate conservation, cultura, and comunidad every day of the year. That’s who we are. Our small but mighty staff works daily to connect youth and families to the outdoors, often leading with a reminder that conservation is a part of our culture—whether it’s preventing wasteful use and reusing materials (who amongst us hasn’t had the bag, the shirt, the food storage container that has been used and reused long beyond its original purpose). Conservation also runs in our veins and manifests in the act of maintaining and passing on a deep connection to nature and working the land, whether by choice or by necessity. We aren’t new to nature and the outdoors. Caring for the planet is part of who we are; it’s part of our values. In fact, last year the Pew Research Center released a study that stated that most Latinx people in U.S. say that global climate change is an important concern. We call that conservation cultura.

We also celebrate our culture every day at Latino Outdoors. Through our Yo Cuento storytelling program, we share stories from across Latinx experiences and proudly serve as a platform to share the outdoor experiences of others through our social media accounts and growing YouTube channel. Whether we celebrate that culture through blog posts, videos, music, podcasts, dance or other forms, storytelling is one of the ways we work to create a world where the outdoors is a place to share and celebrate stories, knowledge and culture while growing leadership and an active community of Latino outdoor users, mentors and stewards.

In addition to celebrating conservation and cultura every day, we also proudly engage in the work of building community and working within the many diverse Latinx communities across the country, each one with unique dialects, expressions, tastes, histories and heritage. With over 20 regions, ranging from Boston, Denver, Missoula, and Washington D.C. to Arkansas, San Antonio, Los Angeles and beyond, our volunteer leaders don’t just invite their communities on LO outings like hiking, kayaking, stewardship projects, bird watching or climbing, they also work within those communities to identify barriers and connect them to the local resources to help overcome them. Most of us are from intentionally marginalized communities, immigrant communities and front-line communities, so we don’t just plan a hike—we plan our hikes with lived experiences and a deep first-hand understanding of the urgent need to connect our communities to nature, breakdown barriers and fight for equitable access to the outdoors. Like many communities of color, the communities we collaborate with and are a part of live with the daily impacts of environmental injustice, of redlining practices, of social injustice, of generational traumas, with the impacts of racism, prejudice and intolerance.

Connecting children, families, early career professionals, students and individuals to nature isn’t just a matter of enjoying the view—though we do enjoy the view—it is a matter of physical and mental health and healing. It’s a matter of providing space within these open spaces where we can break into Spanish and English, share stories of abuelas and tíos y tías, comida y casa, stories of immigration and migration, stories that allow us to be ourselves, to celebrate ourselves and to know that we are part of a larger community. We also work in community with other organizations—the collaborations which allow us to reach a larger audience, to share our mission and vision and connect our people to opportunities and experiences they might miss out on otherwise. Latino Outdoors couldn’t do what we do without the strength of our relationships and the ties to the communities we’re a part of.

So, when I talk about celebrating conservation, cultura and comunidad, you could say it’s part of our DNA.

Still, there’s something incredible and unique about LCW. In the past few years, it has grown its nationwide presence with shout-outs and acknowledgments from National Geographic, the Department of Interior, California State Parks and Latinx policymakers like Senator Alex Padilla. With our partnership with the Hispanic Access Foundation, LCW2022 is planned to feature over 100 in-person activities throughout the week in collaboration with local community-based organizations, national brands, government agencies and nonprofits while, at the same time, LO will also be celebrating with videos, art, virtual panels and more. Thanks to the behind-the-scenes work of incredible organizers at the Hispanic Access Foundation and our team at LO, this year’s LCW promises to be an incredible week featuring panels, videos, events, an LCW photo contest, a sticker contest and our second annual LCW Achievement Awards.

Inspired by #BlackBirdersWeek, and in part by #NationalParkWeek, Latino Conservation Week has been celebrating with daily themes for three years. Themes and topics of focus this year will include #LCW2022KickOff, #RecreateResponsibly, #AguaEsVida, #AdvocacyAfuera, #ConservationCultura, #ComunidadYFamilia and #YoCuento. All are invited to join the celebration regardless of background or heritage, because as much as Latino Conservation Week is about nuestra gente, it’s also a celebration of the work we all do in the name of protecting our planet, being good stewards, opening doors of opportunity and establishing lifelong connections to nature and the outdoors—whether that’s a patch of grass in Brooklyn and Los Angeles or a vista view overlooking the Rocky Mountains.

For my part, I’ll be spending Latino Conservation Week attending hikes highlighting the importance of national monuments and protecting public lands and remembering those childhood memories of my Papá, as a brand new immigrant from Mexico, taking my Hermano and me fishing in Colorado for the first time, or memories from more recent years of my Mamá and our recent experiences kayaking and exploring urban parks in Los Angeles where she summed up the work of conservation with a simple sentence and powerful reminder (as only familia and comunidad can remind d0): “es tu parque cuídalo.”

It’s your park, take care of it.

If you’d like to be a part of the Latino Conservation Week celebration, visit LatinoConservationWeek.com and follow the hashtag #LCW2022 or #LatinoConservationWeek on social media. Join us for this week of conservation, cultura, and comunidad. Nos vemos pronto.

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See the original article posted by Osprey by clicking here.

Christian La Mont is the Program Manager for LO’s storytelling and communications program, Yo Cuento.

Latino Outdoors works to 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. Check out our website!

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It’s All Connected

Por Natalia Ospina

When I think about getting outside, various things come to mind. I think about the general setting of where I will be recreating, and I usually think about the impact being outside will have on my mood. You see, I was once really sick. Not the kinda sick that you get over in a couple of days, drink some soup, watch a lot of Netflix. The kinda sick where you spend years wondering if you’ll ever be able to physically walk more than the block around your house. The kinda sick where you plan outings next to the nearest hospital. You see, a lot of my existence revolved around feeling safe. As I started to learn what treatments worked for me and started to get stronger,  I began to really think about the disconnect between wellbeing and the outdoors.

But why is the conservation /environmental world siloed from the public health world?

I started thinking about how BIPOC communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental justice and adverse health outcomes and wondered if these two worlds could work together. What if there was a world where health care providers could provide patients with a list of parks in their areas (in a way the patient can understand), where they could connect them to environmental groups that can provide patients with gear and information on how to try a particular sport?

We know the future is intersectional, so what if collaboration between these two can improve not only an individual’s health but also decrease hospitalization costs, address health disparities, and potentially become an investment source for conservation? As somebody who dabbles in the weird purgatory world that is being able-bodied most of the time with flares of being bedridden, how neat would it be to be able to have a list of green spaces that are accessible to me when I just want to read a book outside, and a list of trails that I can access when I have my weeks of being able to run miles on miles. What if I could provide all this information to my healthcare team, taking into account air quality, the impact climate change has had on the areas I’m recreating on. To me, it’s all connected. I hope that my mind dump on what I’m putting into action in my new role at an environmental organization outside of Chicago that helps you explore your connection to what it means for our communities to be well.

Community Organizations Building Access to Backcountry

por Victoria Rodríguez

Over ten years ago I embarked on my first backpacking trip to Sykes Hot Springs in Big Sur. I was woefully unprepared for the grueling, 10-mile uphill battle in direct sunlight and what felt like 90-degree heat. I went with a girlfriend of mine, who shared my love of hot-springs, and I came only with a daypack and some bungee-cord, awkwardly securing my sleeping bag.

As unprepared as I was, I fell in love. It was so unlike any camping experience I’d ever had and I immediately knew I’d be back. And I was. I visited Sykes every year until the fires burned down the trail. I also began backpacking at least two to four times a year since then, either solo or with one or two friends; Sykes was an experience that really did open the floodgates for me.

What I had become staunchly aware of back then was the lack of diversity in the backcountry. Living in the Bay Area, I was surrounded by all groups of people – even while camping – but while backpacking two things became apparent: 1) It’s a man’s world and; 2) These men are usually white. Homogeneity is weird to me so I’ve dreamed of a world where these experiences are filled with different people with common goals.

Lost Coast Trail - cascading mountains along the pacific ocean cost

It was a few years ago when I went on a backpacking trip to the Lost Coast in Northern California. My friend Vero and I talked about how we were the only POC’s on the trail, and I’m a white-passing, Spanish-learning Latina. I had a dream a couple of days after this trip where I took a group of Latinx women out to Yosemite for their first backpacking experience and it was this that prompted me to reach out to Latino Outdoors to ask if I could volunteer.

Fast-forward to this past June, and my dream came true. My Program Director set me up with a couple of other LO Volunteers to help lead the outing and I couldn’t have asked for a more capable crew to learn from. This outing took *a lot* of planning, including weekly meetings, outreach, and outside partnerships, but LO had all the resources, we just had to reach out and grab them.

When all our hard work finally came to fruition, I found myself so thankful for everything I was given: incredible leadership partners, sweet + thoughtful + eager participants, and a dream that had become a reality. I’m not really sure how to articulate the emotions that passed through me. They can maybe be explained in moments like when we sat at the top of Mt. Hoffman, lovingly referred to as the Heart of Yosemite. One of our group members spoke of how she never even thought that backpacking could be for her; she never saw herself “in it”. It shocked me how perfectly her story fit in with the conception of this trip and her account brought most of us to tears.

Women swimming in lake at Yosemite campsite

So often members of my community are told they don’t belong in the backcountry, in more ways than one: the advertising that’s only now beginning to showcase diverse people in both ethnicity and sizing (sometimes I wonder…authentically?), the gatekeepers of the outdoors who can be completely uninviting and lack diversity themselves, the outdoor industry and its lack of diversity organizationally, and the sheer disparity of access. It was important for me to have this outing be women & non-binary identifying people-only because women and the queer community have more barriers to the backcountry. These barriers typically revolve around safety and an inequitable feeling of belonging, so I wanted to create a safe, supportive space where no one would feel embarrassed for not knowing something, or not having the “right gear”, and everyone would feel safe in numbers.

Women at trailhead in backpacking gear

I know this was a small group in relation to the whole, but I do feel the more we hold this space the more we are making change. However small that change may be, it was meaningful to this group of women.

Access to gear, transportation, permitting systems, and the like, can be huge barriers for this type of recreation, and we were able to provide all of it. None of our participants had been backpacking before, and they now have the knowledge to pitch a tent, pack their gear, choose which gear to leave home, filter water, and so on. Our trip wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. We had a lot of learnings and areas for improvement, (like a system to organize and track the gear we borrowed, ughhh *face-palm*), but I think it’s radical that we’re even holding this space.

As I look back at our pictures through my lens as a marketer, I think to myself – These are the people that should be flooding our media, and they should have from the start. Working in the outdoor industry for most of my career, it’s my job to highlight these faces and their stories, and I plan to move forward with this intention as much as possible. Special thanks to Latino Outdoors, Yosemite NPS, Fresno BHC, Sandy Hernandez, Veronica Miranda, Araceli Hernandez, and Ruby Rodriguez for making this trip possible. Without you all, I’d be going on my backcountry trips, wishing for change – instead, you gave me the power to take action.

Original blog posted on Linkedin. Victoria was born in Los Angeles, CA, and grew up in both upstate New York and Southern California. Yearly camping trips to Yosemite while living in CA and lake cabins in the summer while in NY, ignited her passion for the outdoors. From there she moved to NorCal to attend San Francisco State University and continued to live in the Bay for over 16 years, while familiarizing herself with the local outdoor activities and cultivating a love for backpacking as the Bay Area is home to numerous backcountry recreation areas.

As a Latino Outdoors volunteer, Victoria aspires to bring more members of Latinx community into the outdoors to share her passion for backpacking and camping, all while educating on best practices for safety and conservation.