Click here to listen to the recent KQED program on youth and Adventure Education.
Overview and Vision
Cultural relevancy is recognized as one of the biggest issues facing outdoor and environmental education programs. While cultural competence and relevancy is an issue that many organizations, staff and participants in the field are working on, significant, permanent change remains an elusive field-wide goal.
This summit offers an opportunity for our communities’ best and brightest to come together to propose and think through strategic directions that will help the field address how this issue creates disconnection between outdoor youth providers and the youth and communities they serve. Our hope is that at the end of the summit, we will have a model that will help guide the way towards bridging the gap between non-traditional outdoor users and their communities and outdoor spaces and programs that help serve them.
Structure
The summit will be a two day working event. Unlike a conference, participants are invited to be active and engage in discussing, debating, and vetting solutions that will help address the issues of cultural relevancy in the outdoor field.
The vision is to create a logic model or theory of change document that can be shared with the rest of our community as a ‘strawman’ for debate, interaction and improvement. Ultimately, the goal is to have a model for change that the field can use as a road map for implementation.
As a working summit, participants are assigned to groups that each focus on a strand or one aspect of the cultural competence model. Guided by a facilitator, discussions are framed by background materials, and other lessons learned from the field. The expectation is that groups explore together how to increase the cultural competency of organizations and the leadership in the field. As a final product, groups create a working document and presentation to share at the end of the summit for eventual publication and dissemination.
REGISTRATION for the working summit soon to come.
SAVE THE DATE APRIL 26 & 27