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Women's Wilderness supports girls, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ+ in accessing their power and improving their health through connections to the outdoors and community.
Decades of leading outdoor trips has taught us that being outdoors, in safe and intentionally-designed environments, has a transformative impact on people. We lead extended programs, courses, and retreats in rock climbing, backpacking, canoeing, and other outdoor sports in the American West. Our work employs outdoor experience to create progress in four main outcome areas: mental health, physical health, leadership development, and environmental stewardship.
Donations from people who believe in the power of the outdoor experience fuel our work. Your micro-gifts will combine to help provide scholarships, transportation, food, backpacking, and climbing gear.
Women’s Wilderness is a unique organization that specializes in empowering wilderness programs for girls, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. We believe girls from all backgrounds and income levels should have access to the power of the great outdoors.
Girls, women, and LGBTQ+ people have different needs from a transformative outdoor experience than those from dominant identities. Our approach aims to support micro and macro equity building in everything from women’s confidence in rock climbing, to supporting leadership of immigrant and refugee girls.
Since our inception, we have awarded more than $385,000 in financial aid. To this day, we have never turned away a girl in financial need.
We believe ACCESS TO NATURE IS A RIGHT and being outdoors has transformative potential for us all.
We WELCOME UNIQUE AND DIVERSE IDENTITIES, experiences, and ideas and rely on them to do our best work.
We COLLABORATE CONTINUOUSLY in partnership and community.
We LEAD from out front, from behind, but most importantly, from within.
We HUSTLE for ourselves and for each other — and after the hustle, we celebrate.
We EVOLVE AND ADAPT individually and collectively in the face of our dynamic world.
We are a vibrant and passionate community of outdoor experts, enthusiasts, and activists.
We are committed to providing safe, respectful, inclusive, and collaborative environments that foster self-awareness and self-actualization. As a team, we aim to create spaces that make our participants feel connected to themselves, each other, and the outdoors.
All backcountry instructors are Wilderness First Responder certified and trained in creating safe experiences for girls, women, and LGBTQ+ folks. We strive to ensure people with shared identities are leading courses, whether that’s women leading girls, LGBTQ+ people leading queer courses, or BIPOC people leading BIPOC programs.
Being outdoors has a transformative impact on people. For each one of us, the impact is unique. However, we have identified trends over time related to the types of change we often see in Women's Wilderness program participants.
We measure our impact based on changes in an individual's behavior, attitude, condition, knowledge, and status. Sometimes, our goal is to support technical skill development (like through our women’s climbing courses). In other programs, such as our girls’ after school and summer programs, we look for positive changes in our four focus areas: mental health, physical health, leadership development, and environmental stewardship.
We take a gender-expansive and intersectional approach to leading people in the outdoors because significant gender barriers still exist in the U.S. to accessing both outdoor recreation and sports broadly. Girls participate in outdoor recreation at significantly lower rates than boys. When considering race, sexuality, socioeconomics, and other intersectional discriminations, opportunities to be outside and feel free are even fewer.
Through Women's Wilderness in 2020:
738 people were served directly
100% of participants were identified as girls, women, or LGBTQ+
47% of participants identified as people of color
65% of participants received financial aid
Would you give $4 a month to support four nonprofits that are making a big difference? Join forces with other 52andChangmakers to automatically give to every Cause of the Week. Every Monday, you’ll wake up knowing you’ve already made a difference! As our community grows, so does the impact!
Together we’ve become volunteers in places we would have never expected, planted milkweed for butterflies, provided books to kids in need, helped save endangered turtles, helped turn excess food into nutrition, helped bring art to youth, educated one another about how we are connected to our delicate food systems, helped save abandoned horses and given old dogs new hope, watched foster youth shine in the spotlight of movie making, helped clean tires out of rivers… we could go on and on and on. It is an absolute joy to be a part of such an amazing network of humans making a difference.
“ALMA reconnects the lives of the formerly incarcerated back to the fabric of society. Our participants have the chance at attaining gainful employment and becoming self-sufficient. Urban Farming helps everyone involved explore the relationships between plants, animals and humans as a way of creating a profound connection to both nature and their community.” - ALMA Backyard Farms
While we’re writing this and you’re reading it, Pajaro Valley Loaves and Fishes is out there, finding ways to provide food to more people in need throughout Santa Cruz County, where one of three residents are reported to be food insecure.
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