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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 will likely continue to. We are listening, learning, and feeling right along side many people. We don’t have any new ideas, we but hope with this blog post to add a lens to make existing ideas land for you in a different way, as many are trying to understand how to e...
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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 clamoring to recruit more people of color. More and more, we’re interacting with boards that have successfully identified and enlisted board members of color. But we’re also noticing that despite the best of intentions, board div...
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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 some version of the equity v. equality image – the one with a fence, people, and boxes. And if you scratched the surface of the Internet to learn about these images, you would also know that there have been many, many iterations, think pieces, and critiques of these image...
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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,” in which we have a million constellations of thoughts on several planes, without much of a logical pathway. But in all of that chaotic processing, we both keep coming back to two things: one related to the substance of campaign, and the other re...
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Dear CNN, Like many colleagues, we were thrilled to see that the topic of diversity in the outdoors has made it to mainstream media with your article “Nature's calling -- for more human diversity.” And we were even more pleased to see so many partners and friends gaining a national platform for this very important conversation, and contributing some key insights. AND . . . we would be remiss if we didn’t say a big “yes, and . . .” to add to and complicate the oversimplified narrative that you and other media outlets continue to prop...
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Photo credit: Glenn Nelson at Trail Posse Friends and colleagues, We are thrilled to announce that José Gonzalez is joining the Avarna Group! We are so grateful to be able to learn from José, who brings a wealth of experience in conservation, outdoor and traditional education, and facilitation. José's name probably rings a bell with most of you, as he has had a tremendous impact on the conversation surrounding relevancy, equity, inclusion, and diversity in the outdoors in the recent past. José is the founder and Executive Direct...
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Implementing President Obama's Memo on Diversity & Inclusion in Public Lands & Waters Dear valued partners and friends: We’re writing to announce that we’ve created a new free toolkit that we hope will help all of you. As many of you know, last Thursday, President Obama made an impactful statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion in our public lands and waters when he issued his Memorandum on Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Our National Parks, National Forests, and Other Public Lands and Water. The memo directs fede...
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We are in the middle of our busiest month, where we are scheduled to give 12 days of workshops for 10+ organizations. We're about half way through and have noticed one common theme in the questions we are asked. Many of our partners and participants want to know: do reverse _____isms exist? That is, can a women be sexist against a man? Or can a person of color be racist? Though the questions are all slightly different, we always give a similar answer, which is: "No. Reverse '-isms' do not exist."' Of course a simple "no" is not enough to ans...
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This week both Aparna and I are engaging in some self-care. Aparna’s was planned - she is out in canyon country with her family, enjoying a few days away from the computer before we hop back into a whirlwind of travel and work. I am taking some less-than-planned self care time as I battle a cold. But first, what is self-care? Well, there are a lot of definitions, but I always think about self-care as the work I do for myself that allows me to be fully present in all aspects of my life, including my work at Avarna. Being present at work ...
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