Decolonization Begins Within | Mercy M’Fon
One of our priorities at Wild Diversity is to decolonize the way we operate to best serve our communities. This process is not a stagnant outline or a tried and true way of doing things…that would be more of the same. For us, decolonizing can look like questioning our processes and asking if there is a better way to serve our community. It is not reinventing or breaking the wheel for the sake of doing it, but because we know during the formation of outdoor education and guided adventures, racism and prejudice were a tenant of these programs. In the years we have been working towards this practice, there have been learnings that help us sink into who we want to become as an organization.
It begins within: Consider that everything you've learned for most of your life has been through a lens that best serves a single demographic. Everything from geography to how much water one should consume in a day. That is also how we should feel about people, places, and ourselves. And includes the way we think about societal hierarchy in all forms, down to different personalities and life goals. In this consideration, we have to personally reevaluate what everything means to us and how we internally think and feel. Every day and every thought could provide an opportunity to grow, expand inclusion and modify the chemical reactions in our bodies to all of the above.
Unlearning has speed bumps: In our Adventure Guide Development program, we take to experience new guides within our program to guide our community. There is much that is toxic within guiding in our industry. Our program speaks to the community aspect of adventures, not perpetuating toxic industry norms and providing a sense of place for our participants. Some guides who have worked with industry giants have a more difficult time letting go of toxic tenets. Sometimes they recognize their harmful experiences from these tenets but, instead of trying to climb to the top, would rather eliminate the hierarchy altogether. Those taking their first steps with Wild Diversity can slide into the comfort of community-centered work. There are certainly challenges with unlearning and diluting those toxins with compassion, and a lot of reminders can help transition folks towards focusing on creating positive community experiences.
Focus on the feeling: When creating our programs, processes, and practices, it is often easiest to focus on what we want our community to feel and not to feel. Those times we felt frightened, intimidated, or disconnected, we built more safety nets, conversations, and prevention in hopes that our community would never have to feel that for themselves. Those times we have felt joy, self-triumph, or affinity, we work toward recreating that sweetness throughout our work and our touchpoints with our community. We work on our own courage to help facilitate, interrupt, or create to shift community experience towards connection to self, others, or place.
While decolonization can feel like everything, it is most often just flexibility. Flexibility for change and flexibility to imagine more for our communities.
