The vision
“How can healing our relationship with the planet help us heal our relationships with ourselves?”
The spotlight
The outdoor life can be a healing place. Spending time in nature can inspire wonder, physical and mental health benefitsand deepen our understanding of the land and ecosystems around us – and our role in caring for them.
This is part of the idea behind the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project, an outdoor program in San Antonio specifically for youth whose families have been affected by incarceration. The organization offers activities such as camping trips, surfing and community gardening, also weaving in meditation, journaling and other exercises meant to promote introspection and empowerment.
“We’re not just an outdoor organization creating more access to the outdoors, or working on climate issues in an exclusively environmental way,” said Ki’Amber Thompson, the program’s founder. “We also do deep healing work with the participants, thinking about not only environmental sustainability, but also social sustainability, and how it connects.”
Creating safe and joyful experiences also means overcoming many barriers these children face to enjoying the outdoors. This includes both historical exclusion from these spaces and a continuing narrative that outdoor recreation is not for people of color. And increasingly, these barriers are exacerbated by extreme weather that makes it increasingly difficult to ensure safety, let alone recovery, outdoors.
Thompson (who uses both they and he pronouns) started the Bloom Project to address a need they saw in their community. Discovering a love of the outdoors while attending college in California, they wanted to enable those same transformative experiences for young people in her hometown of San Antonio—specifically those caught in a system of overpolicing, incarceration, and environmentalism. unjust.
This work is personal to both Thompson and Gabriela Lopez, the organization’s associate director. Lopez’s father has been in prison for most of her life, she said, and as a child she saw nature as a form of therapy that helped her cope. She was excited to join the Bloom Project after spending many years as a teacher and seeing how the school system was not well-equipped to address some of the mental health issues and traumas experienced by young people. “I feel like it’s promoting healing in a way that’s really accessible,” she said of the Bloom Project’s work, “but also creating a generation of advocates, not only for their communities, but for nature and for the outdoors and for the country.”
Lopez (right) with two Bloom Project participants at a retreat in December 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project
In creating those experiences, the Bloom Project’s directors know they’re pushing against the prevailing narrative that outdoor recreation isn’t for everyone. In Texas, about 95 percent of land is privately owned, Thompson said, making access to outdoor spaces challenging — but, they added, that’s just the beginning of the issue. Despite their best efforts to make outdoor excursions feel safe and inclusive, they were still made to feel unwelcome on occasion, a microcosm of the issues people of color face in outdoor access across the country. “We’ve done camping trips in different state parks and at Big Bend National Park in Texas, and we’ve experienced policing on several occasions from white park users,” they said.
Many affinity organizations have emerged to create more visibility and safety in outdoor spaces people of color, people with disabilities, strange people, and others — including Black Outside, the Texas-based organization that has hosted the Bloom Project for the past five years. (Later this year, the program will evolve into its own nonprofit organization.)
At the Bloom Project, the goal is not only to increase access to the outdoors, but to use that access to help these children actively resist systems of oppression—something they, as children of incarcerated parents, take seriously. experience. “Knowing the extent to which black youth are policed in schools, parks, neighborhoods and families, in the Bloom Project, we affirm our youth for who they are and all they bring to our community,” Thompson said. In some ways, she said, the Bloom Project is an experiment in preconfiguring a better, more just world. Sessions include healing or speaking circles for sharing and processing, in an environment intentionally free of policing. And another core part of the programming is education that addresses the realities of the challenges that arise in young people’s lives — always in an age-appropriate way, Lopez said.
On a park day with a group of younger kids earlier this summer, she facilitated an experiment in which they tested how quickly ice cubes would melt on different surfaces—a fun way to learn about the urban heat island effect.
But the heat that melts those ice cubes also represents another, ever more pressing challenge to creating safe and enjoyable outdoor experiences. More frequent and intense extreme weather events – such as Hurricane Beryl, which narrowly missed San Antonio last month — and a new normal of warmer summers means the very tool the Bloom Project uses to facilitate healing and connection is becoming harder to access.
“It’s so, so hot in San Antonio these summers,” Thompson said. Last year the city swelled more than 70 days of triple digit temperatures. Due to heat, the organization does not hold camping trips locally in Texas during the summer months.
“It’s really hard because [summer] is a time where we could see our youth more since they are on a break from school,” Lopez said. But it’s not always worth the risk, nor conducive to the overall mission. “We don’t want to bring people out and make them feel miserable.”
Thompson said they have made adjustments, such as starting some activities earlier in the morning before it gets excessively hot outside and paying attention to basic protections such as hats, sunscreen and shade. The organization also thought about emphasizing water-centric activities in the warmer months, or even indoor sessions.
Bloom Project participants on a trip to White Sands National Park in April 2023. Courtesy of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project
One new program the Bloom Project is launching later this summer, in collaboration with Latino outdoors and the Casey Family Foundation, an organization dedicated to improving the foster care system, is a special four-month group called the Wild Trail Fellowship. That program will focus less on recreation and more on education and career paths in various environmental and outdoor sectors. The first meeting will be in an REI store, Lopez said, where the high school-age participants will go on an indoor scavenger hunt, gather first aid kits and hopefully hear from a store manager.
Across the country, organizations working on outdoor access, education and recreation are grappling with the same conundrum. José González, founder of Latino Outdoors, noted that for the first time this year the nationwide Latino Conservation Week will be moved from late July to late September, due to concerns about the heat. And even if an event is not canceled or postponed, extreme weather has increasingly become part of planning. “A lot of people don’t know how heat can affect them — how to detect heat stroke, for example — so it’s important to note that as part of risk management and the education for participants,” he said.
In May, the outdoor education organization Outward Bound coordinated three events in Vancouver, Halifax and Toronto, bringing together more than 60 groups from across Canada to discuss how the outdoor sector can adapt to climate impacts, and also be part of mitigation. One wilderness program manager noted that “climate change has irrevocably shifted the landscape of outdoor education.”
While the realities of climate change exacerbate the challenges faced in creating restorative and joyful experiences in the outdoors, they also make that work all the more urgent. The ultimate goal for the Bloom Project, Thompson said, is to equip these young people with a sense of agency and radical imagination that will help them usher in a healthier, more just world.
“Sometimes with legal education, it’s really focused on all the problems,” Thompson said. “And it’s true, and it’s important to be educated about it.” But, they said, the key is to find the right balance, and to create the right container that can allow moments of heaviness alongside moments of reflection — and fun. “Joy is what sustains us,” they said, “and just accessing and tuning into it is so important to having the ability to [not only] want to be here first, but imagine a better world.”
– Claire Elise Thompson
More exposure
A parting shot
If extreme heat makes it more challenging to find healing respite outdoors, it also increases the risk for athletes who push their bodies to the limit in outdoor environments—including many who is competing in the Olympics in Paris this summer. While some countries have made plans to protect their athletes by bringing portable air conditioners to Olympic Village (Paris officials’ plans to green the games thwarted), others, including the Olympics’ medical department, have suggested heat acclimatization training as a way to adapt. In this photo, spectators mill around tennis courts at Roland Garros Stadium on July 31 – day five of the matches, when temperatures in Paris reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
