Disruption is hard, and it is necessary. A single lightning strike can cause what looks to be devastation as it starts a forest fire: shrubs and grasses are burned to dust, trees are killed, and soot and ash blanket the landscape. And yet, fire is essential to maintaining biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem. In Oregon, fire allows big old oaks or pines with their fire-resistant bark – that would otherwise be overshadowed by younger firs and maples – to thrive. Fire creates a diverse landscape with a variety of forest types, including young forests, clearings, and old growth, where a wide array of plants, animals, and fungi can live and prosper in the habitat that suits them best. Wildfire, in many ecosystems, is necessary for life.
There exists a parallel between the resurgence in national focus on the Black Lives Matter movement and the necessary disturbance of fire in the forests of the western United States. It may be oversimplified, and of course the current fires in the United States illustrate that historic fire management practices and climate change have led to a situation where fires are burning too hot and fast to serve their essential role in the ecosystem. Nonetheless, the parallel is useful. And as a community who loves nature, this is as good a place as any to start in our effort to embrace the disturbance of a system for the value it can bring to the same system long-term.
At Inspiring Girls Expeditions, we’re paying attention to the essential and necessary disruption created by the Black Lives Matter movement to our everyday thinking and activities. The movement has opened our eyes and hearts to the imbalances in our own cultural ecosystem, and the impact of these disparities on the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color who do not reap the same benefits from our organization as those of us with white privilege do. We’re taking this time to look at the big picture and consider how we operate, what we’re missing, and how we can intentionally open up our own cultural ecosystem to function at a higher level.
Inspiring Girls Expeditions is working to facilitate learning and change in all areas of our work. Here are a few ways we’re moving forward with efforts to create a more just and equitable environment for participants, volunteers, and staff:
We're devoting time in our regular, community-wide meetings to learn from previous mistakes and discuss new strategies to reduce bias in our work moving forward.
We are working to overhaul the size and composition of our Steering Committee towards being more racially integrated at the leadership level of our organization, a renewal that we aim to have in place by the end of 2020.
We're coordinating with our partner institutions and local experts to offer our instructors and volunteers further opportunities to become more well-versed in educating for social justice and facilitating tough and important conversations about race. For example, the Inspiring Girls Expeditions Alaska community will participate in a Land Acknowledgement workshop towards learning how to better understand and incorporate Indigenous land ownership knowledge into our programs.
We're working with the Office of Institutional Diversity at Oregon State University, one of our partner institutions, to complete a holistic equity evaluation of our organization and the programs we run. This evaluation's resulting action items will assist us in making necessary structural and cultural changes so we are ready to recruit new community members of color into a community ready to nurture them.
One of our members started a book club that meets regularly to read and discuss the anti-racism workbook Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad, and view our learning efforts through the lens of making change in Inspiring Girls Expeditions.
The Inspiring Girls Expeditions “forest” can only benefit from a cleansing fire to help pull out old structures that have served to suppress the growth of the diverse and complex ecosystem that is a healthy forest. Through our efforts, we hope to create an environment where Black, Indigenous and other people of color coming into our programs and our leadership community will find a place to take root and thrive.