Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge – 2020 Report
For more on The Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge, please visit www.insolidarityproject.com.
The Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge connects leading outdoor brands with inclusion advocates to advance representation for people of color across the industry. We’re focused on enhancing representation across staff and executive teams, media and marketing, and athletes/ambassadors. By building a relationship of support, empathy and understanding, versus external skepticism and internal stress, we’re moving the outdoor industry towards authentic inclusion.
Free Forest School’s Executive Director, Anna Sharratt, signed the Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge in 2019. The following is our 2020 Annual Report on the work we’ve undertaken to promote diversity and advance equity and inclusion.
1) What efforts have you made to promote inclusion and representation for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color at your organization? This can include internal training, external initiatives, personal growth, metrics, partnerships, grants, etc.
2020 has provided Free Forest School with a unique opportunity to tackle the important work of promoting inclusion and representation for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. With in-person FFS gatherings cancelled for most of the year due to COVID-19, we were able to take the time to pause and re-think our operations and priorities in a deep and critical way, seeking to bring many voices to the table to imagine creative solutions to overcome barriers and expand access to outdoor play, and to re-envision a new and more equitable future for Free Forest School.
In June, as the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing nationwide protests sparked scrutiny of the institutional racism embedded within companies and organizations across the country, members of our community spoke out to identify ways in which Free Forest School was failing to fully live up to the principles which we had outlined in our organization’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Statement. We are grateful to the volunteers and participants who shared their concerns and suggestions. With the help of these community members, Free Forest School undertook a season of learning, listening, and analysis, culminating in the development of a plan to fundamentally restructure the organization in ways designed to center the inclusion and representation of marginalized and underrepresented communities, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color.
Recognizing the need for strong leadership in this effort from those at the head of the organization, our Executive Director and Board enrolled in a four-module “Whiteness at Work” course led by the Adaway Group. We made space to engage deeply with the course materials through tailored reflection prompts on our internal training platform and several dedicated Board discussion sessions, through which we sought to apply what we were learning to Free Forest School specifically. Having completed the course, we are continuing the work by developing a list of “touchstones” for racial equity from our learning that we can use to assess all future FFS initiatives in order to ensure that they are holding true to the core principles the modules illuminated. Our goal is to identify and eliminate the influence of white supremacy culture on our organizational structures and operations. Board members have also signed up for additional related training in 2021 led by Equity in the Center. The Board is also developing plans to welcome two new cohorts of Board members in 2021, with an emphasis on ensuring the robust representation of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color on the Board.
Based on the input of community members, we also recognized the need for an organizational grievance policy and process grounded in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice, and including methods for reporting problems and incidents of discrimination, bias, harassment, or racism. We have worked to develop this policy and to bring it before members of our DEIJ Committee for review. As part of this initiative, one of our Board members is working to coordinate a grievance response team rooted in restorative practices.
Our most significant undertaking in 2020 was a four-month Community Visioning process, which sought to invite community input through a wide range of avenues, with the goal of developing a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable model to structure the organization in the years to come. Modes of engagement included community-wide snap surveys, a set of in-depth working groups, a series of interviews with community leaders in related fields, and regular live video updates to share progress and invite feedback. This was the first time we as an organization had so directly and thoroughly involved our broader community in the organizational planning process, and this was done intentionally with the acknowledgement that a diverse set of voices is critical to ensuring that our programming meets the unique needs of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color along with other marginalized and underrepresented communities.
Among the most fruitful aspects of this process were the community leader interviews — with such organizations as Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES), Latino Outdoors, the Hmong Early Childhood Coalition, St. Louis’s Southside Early Childhood Center and Vision for Children at Risk, the Children & Nature Network, and the Natural Start Alliance. In these interviews, we discussed the barriers faced by the communities the organizations serve and support and need to overcome those barriers, as well as potential opportunities for future collaboration. Key takeaways from these interviews included an affirmation of the relevance of our mission and goals for caregivers of young children across many different cultures/identifiers, the importance of culturally relevant and representative messaging and a multi-pronged outreach approach, the need for resources to support DIY nature play, and the observation that outreach to diverse cultural/linguistic groups should be led by representatives of those groups. Many promising collaboration opportunities were identified as well.
One collaboration that emerged was a workshop led in partnership with CLUES for thirty Latinx caregivers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. These caregivers reflected on their childhoods spent playing in nature across Central America — and the fact that their kids’ experiences have been very different. They identified the leading barriers that undermined their ability to engage in outdoor play with their children, including COVID fear, uncertainty about where to go and how to dress for winter, the challenge of finding inexpensive outdoor gear, and the need for peer support. They then developed ideas for solutions, including creating a list of local green spaces with information on access and safety, holding community gatherings at green spaces to let kids play while providing peer support for caregivers, creating a gear swap system, and developing culturally relevant resources in Spanish. This powerful workshop illuminated the value of working directly with community members to empower them to envision and enact the solutions that will best meet their unique needs, and we have plans to replicate it with a number of other groups in 2021 via the connections we made during our interviews.
Finally, the end of 2020 and the conclusion of our Community Visioning process saw us outlining concrete plans for an overhaul of our approach specifically designed to center the inclusion and representation of marginalized and underrepresented communities, including Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. Shifts planned in this regard include a switch from a top-down to a bottom-up training approach, reversing the concentration of power amidst a small number of individuals with significant time and resources to spare, launching a Member Advisory Council to help chart the course of the organization’s work, embracing a broader and more flexible range of approaches, reducing the barriers to entry for volunteers, providing more accessible entry points for people with limited familiarity / confidence / prior experience, shifting our resource allocation to prioritize those who face higher barriers, initiating a fee-based structure where participants who are able contribute in order to support programming while anyone not able to contribute can join for free, ensuring that our recruitment and hiring practices and employee expectations are sustainable and accessible, managing our expectations and slowing our timeline to ensure ample time for community engagement, acknowledging and providing avenues for people to share their unique cultural connections to nature, conducting specific outreach to marginalized communities, facilitating participant-created networks and solutions, providing anti-racism and DEIJ training to all participants in their initial onboarding, translating resources into multiple languages, and creating clear pathways to provide feedback and clarify needs not currently being met. We have outlined a detailed, phase-based approach to gradually and sustainably incorporate these approaches into our model over the coming years.
2) What has proved successful? How do you know?
As so much of this work has been internal and focused on laying groundwork for future programming, it is difficult to quantify its success as yet. As we launch our member platform in the coming year, we have plans to collect demographic data in order to allow us to track representation, engagement, and retention across race and other factors, so that we can assess our initial status as well as the impact of future interventions and initiatives.
3) What is still challenging for you? Why? What support do you still need?
The greatest challenge to our immediate progress towards our goals in this arena is the dwindling of our financial resources as a result of decreasing donations due to the impact of COVID-19. This has halted our plans to hire additional staff, including a DEIJ Coordinator. It has also limited our capacity to quickly act on the suggestions of our community members and to launch new initiatives. Reliance on volunteers with inconsistent availability has pushed us towards primarily pursuing the “low-hanging fruit” of supporting those who face the most minimal barriers, an approach which disadvantages Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color. We hope to be able to counter this shortcoming as we launch our fee-based membership, which will allow us to engage our most resourced members in providing for systems that can better support those with higher needs.
Obviously, COVID-19 has also posed more direct barriers to our ability to support Black, Indigenous, and other Families of Color in accessing unstructured outdoor play. Not only were our regular local chapter sessions forced to pause — we were also forced to cancel our Minneapolis Parks Pilot, a new effort we were working to launch with the support of a grant from People for Parks which was aimed at reaching a predominantly BIPOC community not served by the local FFS chapter. Due to the ways that Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are both (1) disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, and (2) more likely to lack access to safe, resourced nature spaces, we know that this year has widened already significant racial disparities in our mission area which will persist even after the pandemic has abated.
It will take concerted effort to recover from these effects. We will need to maintain a concerted focus on the goal of promoting inclusion and representation for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color in the coming year in order to ensure that this effort receives the energy it deserves and requires. Free Forest School is committed to continuing to pursue this work, recognizing that it is an ongoing journey which must infuse and shape every step we take and every choice we make as we move forward.
