The Importance of Inviting All to Outdoor Spaces

If you work in the outdoor education space, or if you are a frequent visitor to nature parks, you have probably noticed that often, there is not a huge amount of diversity in who is out enjoying what the parks have to offer. We certainly noticed that in our parks and through our free public programming that we host through Johnson County Conservation (JCC). Johnson County boasts a relatively diverse population for the state of Iowa. However, if you go out to any of our parks on a Saturday afternoon, the majority of the visitors will likely look somewhat like me (I’m a fair-skinned blonde woman, for reference). There are not a lot of park users with black or brown skin, not a lot of people with disabilities, and not as many elders using trails outside of the most popular park areas. 

The same trend would be noticed in environmental programming, whether considering attendance at any of the numerous nature summer camps in the area, nature-focused afterschool programming, or any of the free environmental programs hosted by JCC or other organizations. Not everyone in our community has access to these programs, places, and experiences, whether due to transportation, cost, or time barriers, lack of marketing to all in the community, or simply feeling unwelcome or unsafe to attend.

That not all people have access to nature parks and programming is an injustice. Regular access to nature can provide a huge boost in quality of life, from improving mental health and increasing physical fitness, to providing the spiritual benefits that can come from connections with the natural world. Ensuring that all people in our community have access to nature parks and programming matters. As county naturalists, it is important to us that everyone feels safe and welcome to attend nature programs. So, a few years ago, our education team at Johnson County Conservation decided to shift our programming priorities to devote a large percentage of our time to diversity-focused programming, helping to welcome in people who historically have not had as much access to nature programs.  

The key to our progress has been partnering with organizations in our community that serve the demographics we wanted to welcome. Our two biggest year-round partners are United Action for Youth and the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County. We also work with Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Mariam Girls’ Club, the Coralville Food Pantry, Queer Hikers of Iowa, the Senior Center of Iowa City, TRAIL, the Iowa City Autism Community, and several disability-focused adult dayhab centers. Through these partnerships, we can provide tailored experiences that meet the needs of each group we are serving. We also can eliminate some of the barriers of transportation and marketing, as the organizations are better able to reach a broader demographic. 

The programs developed through our partnership with United Action for Youth have been one of the achievements we’re most proud of in the past couple years. United Action for Youth (UAY) is an Iowa City-based organization that serves youth in numerous ways: mental health and counseling support, providing community for LGTBQ+ teens, housing unhoused teens, support for young parents, and organizing safe and fulfilling engagement activities for young people, amid other services. Through our partnership, JCC hosts year-round outdoor recreation programming with them, mostly for BIPOC, LGTBQ+, or low-income teens. In the summer, we take middle and high school students kayaking, canoeing, fishing, and hiking, and spend a day doing archery with these groups. On no-school days in the fall, winter, and spring, we may spend the day doing those same activities, foraging, doing compass races, snowshoeing, or building primitive shelters and fires. The capstone event we provide as partners is a three-day backpacking trip to the Yellow River State Forest in northeast Iowa. During this trip, we teach backpacking basics like tent set-up, cooking over backcountry stoves, map reading, water filtration, and more. This trip serves as a recruitment tool for us as well, helping us to reach a wider diversity of teens in marketing a separate ten-day backpacking trip we lead. So far, two teens from the UAY trip have joined us on that even larger ten-day adventure, teens that we otherwise likely would not have reached without our partnership with UAY. 

Experiences like these can help to deepen these participants’ connections with the natural world, but they also provide tangible benefits to the development of each individual. By getting out of their comfort zones and trying kayaking or archery, teens can gain self confidence and the courage to try new things. By working together to build fires with people they met only hours before, they gain skills in teamwork and communication. While putting up their tents, cooking their food, and deliberating about which direction to take at the trail intersection on the backpacking trip, these teens are practicing leadership and problem-solving skills that will aid them long into their future academic and career pursuits. 

Through our partnership with the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County, we are exposing kids to nature at a very young age, in hopes that they build lasting relationships with the natural world, and maybe even grow up to be naturalists themselves. Like UAY, the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County (NCJC) provides numerous human services to the community, focusing on low-income neighborhoods. These services include early childhood education, after school programming, leadership and job training for middle and high school students, and various family services to support parents. In 2022, we started our partnership with NCJC by launching Nature Buds, a monthly nature program we provide in their three- and four-year-old classrooms. Through this program, we are able to see the same 64 kids each month, building loving and positive relationships with each kid, and continuously building on their previous nature programming. In these programs, we emphasize hands-on exploration to deepen engagement. If we’re teaching about worms, we bring a big tub of worms in dirt for them to unearth and investigate. When teaching about beavers, we bring sticks and mud for them to build dams of their own. When teaching about spiders or reptiles, we’ll bring in our live tarantula or snakes for the kids to touch and hold. At the end of the year, these kids celebrate their completion of the year’s Nature Buds program with a capstone field trip to F.W. Kent Park where they enjoy a hike, exploration of our education center, and a picnic. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we launched a partnership with the Iowa City Senior Center at the start of 2024 to increase nature programming opportunities for senior citizens. Many of our standard nature programs involve physical activities that are too strenuous for some people, including many elders. Through this partnership, we host seasonal nature lectures at the Senior Center, designed to teach in depth natural science content, but also as a means for socializing and community-building. We also host half-mile hikes at Kent Park for those able to head out on a hiking adventure, to help this same community continue to be physically active while learning about the prairie, forest, or birds around them. 

We get to enjoy many other less-frequent but equally meaningful programs with other partners as well. We’ve led extremely joyful and laughter-filled kayaking and archery programs for Mariam Girls’ Club, an organization that serves teen Muslim women. A former naturalist led several LQTBQ+-focused hikes, and partnered with Queer Hikers of Iowa to co-lead and increase awareness for these events. Each year we set up fishing, kayaking, hiking, or wetland-exploration events for bigs and littles through Big Brothers Big Sisters to enjoy evenings out in fresh air together. And we bring our snakes into the Coralville Food Pantry for monthly reptile meet-and-greets so that kids (and parents!) attending their free summer lunch programs can build positive relationships with these oft-reviled animals. 

Many of these wonderful partnerships were formed the same way: with an email and an invitation to say “we see you, we want to work with you, and we want you to feel welcome in these outdoor spaces and programs.” As naturalists, we have the ability to create community, and we feel it is important that we use our role to broaden who feels welcome. Each of us can take the step to reach out to a part of our community that has historically had less access to natural spaces and nature programming, and find ways to build more access and connection. In Johnson County, we have many more steps we hope to take to keep welcoming others in, but we’re also proud of what we have achieved so far.  

About the Author

Kristen grew up on a farm in northeast Iowa, and started adventuring early. Whether exploring the countryside by bike, wading in the Cedar River, or backpacking, canoeing, or skiing with family, she was almost always outside. Backpacking especially shaped her childhood, adolescence, and eventually her career path. After spending many summers backpacking as a teen, Kristen went on to study Environmental Science at Iowa State University while working as a backpacking guide over the summers. After school, Kristen continued work leading backpacking trips in New Mexico. She also spent time working with a traveling restoration crew with the Iowa Nature Conservancy, in northern Idaho working for a watershed restoration organization, and up in northern Minnesota where she worked as a naturalist. Kristen now serves as a naturalist for Johnson County Conservation and gets to lead a wide array of outdoor programming, from school field trips and adult education programs to restoration-focused volunteer events, and her favorite: backpacking trips and other multi-day adventure programming. When not working, Kristen likes to hike with her dog and husband, feel overwhelmed by the amount of garden veggies to harvest and cook, paint, or go on her own wilderness adventure.