For Rue Mapp, climate action starts with a love of the wild. Growing up in northern California, she split her time between urban Oakland and her family’s ranch in Lake County. Exploring the lush landscape, she developed a lifelong love of adventure – climbing, swimming, hunting, and more. As an adult, she realized her experience was not represented in mainstream media, where images of Black leadership in nature were few and far between.
In 2009, she launched Outdoor Afro as a blog to help address this lack of representation. Over time, the organization evolved into a national not-for-profit dedicated to reconnecting Black communities with nature through education, recreation, and conservation. Today, volunteers lead experiences in 34 states across the country, reaching over 200,000 people via online and in-nature events including activities like fishing, hiking, biking, kayaking, gardening, and skiing.
One of the organization’s core programs, Making Waves, teaches Black children and their caregivers how to swim. For Mapp, this is a critical step in mitigating the historic impact of segregation, which denied Black communities access to public pools and beaches. As a result, Black children in the U.S. currently drown at far higher rates than their white peers. Reconnecting with water is a gateway to embracing the outdoors. “I know that if a child's afraid of water, they're never going to put a pole in a lazy lake,” she explains. “They're never going to ease into a tippy kayak, and they're not going to care about plastic in the ocean.”
Ultimately, Outdoor Afro’s mission is to cultivate joy and a sense of belonging, forging connections between smiling kids and adults alike as they embark on each new adventure. “So often the narrative of the Black experience starts with and often ends with the story of pain and peril,” Mapp says. “We need something else to draw our energy from, our sustainability from, and I know I get my energy from joy.”
For more about Outdoor Afro, visit https://outdoorafro.org/.
