Alice Jasper Color Out Here

Color out here BY ALLISON ARNOLD PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN HUVER

Despite growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Alice Jasper (who also goes by Alice Lyn), spent a lot of time outdoors, going on small hikes with her dad in Prospect Park, and going camping on the weekends. Her connection to nature continued to grow when she moved to the Upper Peninsula to attend Northern Michigan University, a landscape and community much different than New York City.

For Jasper, Grand Rapids is a happy medium; affording her the things she loves about living in a big city, while being able to access outdoor recreation. She’s been here since 2015, serving as the Director of Sustainability for The Gilmore Collection and as the Associate Program Director for the Lakeshore Ethnic Diversity Alliance, and sitting on the board for the West Michigan Sustainable Business Forum.

Jasper is currently the program manager for Local First’s Good for Michigan program and serves on the West Michigan Environmental Action Council’s Inclusion Development of Environmental Allies and Leaders Committee, which was created in 2013 to bring people together from underrepresented communities to fight environmental justice issues that tend to disproportionately affect marginalized groups.

When she was working at the Lakeshore Ethnic Diversity Alliance, some of her clients who worked for environmental organizations asked her to facilitate a workshop on racial equity.

“I started to just kind of do more research into the reasons that there is a lack of diversity in the outdoors, and it was something that always resonated with me,” said Jasper. “My experience and being outside, there are definitely fewer people of color than there are white people, and so just kind of learning more about the historical barriers to that as I was creating workshops for these clients, it really started to sink in with me a

“Color Out Here” is Jasper’s most recent project and it unpacks just this. As part of WGVU Public Media’s Shaping Narratives program aimed at giving people of color a platform to tell stories, Jasper and four others underwent a series of training to produce their own documentaries or podcasts for the Shaping Narratives series.

“We each created our own individual media projects just pertaining to things that we were passionate about and how they intersected with our racial identities,” said Jasper, who is biracial. “So I decided to pick diversifying outdoor recreation and what that looks like and also as a means of kind of building positive relationships for people of color and the outdoors because I feel like that's a way to kind of help diversify environmental advocacy moving forward.”

From the lack of diversity in early environmental activism, to historical barriers, such as the inability for black people to own land, there are a number of things that shape the way people of color have and continue to interact with nature.

“Not more than a generation or two ago, black people would feel like if you go out in the woods, you might not come back,” said Jasper. “The term Redskins comes from people being literally hunted.” According to Jasper, transgenerational trauma can play a role in how young people feel about the outdoors.

Color Out Here stars Jasper, along with a group of friends and colleagues, who take a trip to Idlewild, Michigan, a historic lakeside resort town where black people were allowed to purchase property and engage in recreational activities before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, they go canoeing, attend a music festival, sleep beneath the stars, and confront their personal relationships with nature.

The show is available on WGVU’s website, but viewers can stay tuned for more. “We are looking for funding right now, actually, to do a whole season,” said Jasper.

Allison Arnold is a freelance writer and avid adventurer who loves hiking, traveling and trying new foods. She loves writing about food and culture on her blog, For the Love of Tacos.

ALICE LYN EXAMINES DISPARITIES IN OUTDOOR RECREATION

“I started to do more research into the reasons that there is a lack of diversity in the outdoors, and it was something that always resonated with me.” — ALICE LYN

From the lack of diversity in early environmental activism to historical barriers, such as laws banning black people from owning land, there are a number of things that shape the way people of color have and continue to interact with nature.