Mazamas as Change Agents for our Community

by Chris Ledoux, Climbing Committee Curriculum Development Manager co-facilitator of the Leadership Development Outdoor Leadership Program, and member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee.

This will be a regular column in the newsletter over the next year. During this time, Jesse Applegate, Mazama Executive Council member and Mazama climb leader, and I will be participating as representatives from the Mazamas in the Change Agent Cohort of Intertwine Alliance. This cohort, which was planned last winter, kicked off last month virtually and is facilitated by DRC Learning Solutions, led by Dr. Derron Coles, Lauren Gottfredson, and Alexis Millett.

We hope to bring from this cohort new language, skill sets, and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) toolkits. These will help us build and share the understanding needed to push through personal, organizational, and systemic barriers and achieve a more equitable and inclusive organization and teams.

These skills are integral to our experience with this cohort as well as envisioning what we can do as Mazamas to further our mission of inspiring everyone to love and protect the mountains. Therefore, I’d like to share part of the Intertwine Alliance Equity and Inclusion Strategy:

“The Intertwine Alliance’s vision for equity is that people of all identities and ages are connected to nature and work together to create and sustain communities in which they can fulfill their promise to be prosperous, healthy and safe. For many communities, specifically communities of color, this is not a current reality, which highlights the need to increase access to and availability of basic resources, including nature.

The Alliance honors the diverse ways communities already connect with nature while recognizing the historical and current barriers that have been put in place to create disproportionate access to new and existing resources: that there are structural barriers that marginalized communities face that are often reinforced by cultural barriers. We work to dismantle these barriers and both ends in order to create more equitable access.”

You can learn more at www.theintertwine.org/equity-andinclusion-strategy and www.theintertwine.org/projects.

When we started with this cohort last winter, the Intertwine Alliance was committed to focusing on racial justice in their programming. Several ICS students shared perspectives on why equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging matter. We can encourage this by focusing on racial justice, too. I look forward to using this space to share what we learn and ways for you to engage. Together, we can help the Mazamas become a more inclusive organization.