More Than Adventure
Each and every year Wild Diversity hosts a series of adventures. Our core adventures are backpacking, camping, single day and overnight kayaking trips, and a diverse range of day adventures and outdoor workshops. This year we hosted elective adventures like freediving and mountain biking. We love seeing the BIPOC & LGBTQ+ communities thrive in the outdoors. Here are some ways that we are working towards supporting these exceptional communities.
We are more than adventures; we are outfitters too. Did you know that Wild Diversity provides outdoor gear for all of their adventures? We know that one cannot just jump in an outdoor trip without hundreds of dollars of gear to keep them comfortable and out of harm's way. We support our community by providing tents, sleep systems, and kitchen sets to match the adventure. We maintain, deep clean and update our gear each season to ensure that our participants have the best possible experience outdoors. We hope that our gear continues to increase outdoor access for our community for years to come.
We are educators. We want our community to join us and we want our community to feel confident without us. We teach participants the ins and outs of each adventure and allow them to have hands-on experience over the course of the weekend. It is common for someone who just learned to cook outdoors to be able to demo it for one of their co-adventurers by the end of the weekend. Our dream is that new adventurers can feel ready and comfortable to go on adventure with friends and family after adventuring with us.
We are advocates. Much needs to be changed in the outdoor industry. When it comes to equity, racial and gender justice the outdoor industry feels like it is creaking along. We have pushed, inspired, supported and advocated for so much change that we have seen in this industry. This, and all the work that so many other community partners are doing in this industry, has created a visual presence of progress towards equity and representation in the outdoors. The wave of BIPOC & LGBTQ+ groups and organizations is the fastest growing sector of the outdoor industry. We all collectively became the change we wanted to see.
We are learners. We are in a place in time where there is more research and more words that speak to what the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities have been going through. These concepts and values didn't exist 10 years or even 5 years ago. We can't let our egos get in the way of being learners and growers. We reevaluate our processes regularly to ensure that we can incorporate these concepts and values to best support our community. We learn from community feedback and we learn from our missteps to guide ourselves towards something that can truly feel supportive to these communities that we are so passionate about. There is no tried and true way of serving our communities and if we ever think so it means we have stopped growing.
We are adventurers, educators, advocates and learners. These parts of ourselves and our supportive community are what make Wild Diversity unique. We are at the intersection of love of the outdoors and love for our communities. We are focused on creating better and more robust experiences outdoors. Thank you for joining us on our journey.
