A New Map to A Familiar Trail
The trail wasn’t asking either of us to win the encounter. It was asking us to notice one another.
Rue Mapp is the founder and CEO of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit that celebrates and inspires Black leadership in nature. From her hometown of Oakland, Rue started Outdoor Afro as a blog in 2009, growing it to an organization in more than 70 U.S. cities that connects people through hikes, conservation, and the outdoors rooted in joy, culture, and belonging. Rue has been recognized with the Heinz Award and in Oprah’s Book Club for her book Nature Swagger.
The trail wasn’t asking either of us to win the encounter. It was asking us to notice one another.
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. When I was 9 years old, I was glued to a documentary series on PBS called Eyes on the Prize, … Read more
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"The story of Outdoor Afro really begins, for me, in my own family."