Make sure your public statement isn’t window dressing: There is your public statement, and then there’s the work
Written by Ava
June 2, 2020
By: Ava Holliday and Aparna Rajagopal In her essay “Poetry is not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde wrote "there are no new ideas-there are only new ways of making them felt." (Sister Outsider, p. 39). Over the past week we have heard people speak their truths and share ideas, and we…
Video & Resources on COVID-19 & Conservation/the Outdoors
Written by Aparna
April 1, 2020
Dear Community, Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we at the Avarna Group have been trying to figure out our role, what to say, and how to move forward. We know that COVID-19 has exposed structural inequities and injustices that predated the pandemic, and that individual and institutional responses…
Why it’s not enough to enlist board members of color: a cookie tale
Written by Aparna
December 10, 2019
As the year draws to a close and my family enters cookie baking mode, I’m thinking about a harder nut to crack than chestnuts on an open fire: white-led conservation and outdoor nonprofit boards. We’ve noticed that in their urgency to diversify, many conservation and outdoor nonprofit boards have been…
The role of white affinity spaces in anti-racism work
Written by Ava
September 20, 2019
In the spring, PGM ONE organizers asked me to write a piece about why white folks shouldn’t show up to PGM ONE. It was a piece that flowed out of me easily. I had been having the conversation about the importance and value of affinity spaces for people with marginalized…
And . . . here’s yet another equity v., equality (v. justice) image series
Written by Aparna
May 25, 2019
We wanted to tell you the story of why we decided to create yet another equality v. equity (v. justice) image series, which you can access here. For those of you who have been engaged in some conversation about equity in the past ten years, you inevitably have come across…
Bearing witness to painful stories
Written by Aparna
April 24, 2019
Similar to when Camber Outdoors unveiled its 2019 Pledge, we (Ava and Aparna) have had a lot of thoughts and ideas swirling around in our heads as the #WontTakeSHIFTAnymore campaign has rolled out. We have brains that tend to go into a mode that we lovingly call, “entropic processing overdrive,”…