Webinar: The Stories We Don’t Tell About People of Color in the Outdoors

A recording of this webinar can be found here.

We hope you can join us for a webinar Thursday, February 28th from 12:00 p.m to 1:00 p.m. to hear about engaging people of color in the outdoors. Speaker Amanda E. Machado will share her personal story as a woman of color becoming involved in the environmentalist movement and facilitate a conversation about how to be more inclusive.

“This talk will explore how traditional narratives in the environmentalism movement and in outdoor recreation culture as a whole have historically not reflected the values and experiences of people of color. In this talk, I’ll share my personal story of how I got involved in the environmentalist and outdoors space after taking a year off to travel and hike across four continents in 2012, and why I had felt excluded from those spaces previously. I’ll then present three-five common narratives our culture often tells about people of color in the outdoors, and discuss what they miss, particularly in terms of race and other systems of power. After, participants will have a chance to brainstorm how we can combat erasure and how can tell more than just– as writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie named — the “single story” we often have about people of color outside.”-Amanda E. Machado

About the Speaker

Amanda E. Machado is a writer, editor, and facilitator who has lived and worked around the world. After teaching 9th grade English as a Teach for America corps member, she spent fifteen months backpacking South America, South Asia, Western Europe and the Western United States. Since then, she built a career as a freelance writer while living temporarily in cities like Cape Town, Havana, and Berlin.

Amanda has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, Outside, REI Co-Op Journal, Quartz, Business Insider, and others, and has worked as a social justice editor for Matador Network, the world’s largest independent travel magazine. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Longreads, Jezebel, the She Explores podcast, and several other publications, radio programs, and blogs. In addition to her essay writing, Amanda also facilitates workshops on issues of equity and social justice for organizations around the world.

Amanda has a degree in English Literature and Nonfiction Writing from Brown University.