Vámonos Outside is getting Latinx youth into the rivers and onto the slopes

As a high school student in Los Angeles, Wesley Heredia never joined his classmates on their annual trips to the slopes.

But that wasn’t because he didn’t have the desire — he just didn’t have the dinero.

“I had a lot of friends in high school who were going skiing, and going to the mountains every year, but I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t afford it,” said Heredia.

Yet being deprived of that opportunity deepened his interest in the outdoors. So much so that as he was pursuing a degree in environmental studies and sustainability at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, he made up for what he missed out on in high school.

“That stayed at the back of my mind,” Heredia said. “So I became involved in an outdoor program that had a shuttle to the mountains, and I took a snowboarding class there. I really loved it, because I really love winter.”

But what Heredia, 29, also loves is the chance to help other Latinx youth get the chance that he didn’t get as a young person: the chance to experience nature and the outdoors. That’s why, in 2019, he found his way to Vámonos Outside.

Vámonos Outside (or, “Let’s Go Outside”), is based in Bend, Oregon. A program born of the national nonprofit Latino Outdoors, Vámonos Outside works to navigate cultural and economic barriers with the aim of exposing Latinx youths to nature and outdoor recreation in an area that is bursting with it.

“Central Oregon is a hub of outdoor recreation, and we’re lucky to have so much access to nature here,” said Heredia, who gave a presentation about his organization’s efforts during a trip to Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia last May, at the 2022 Inside-Out International Conference.

“From biking, to mountain biking, to kayaking, to skiing, we have it all… but many Latinos aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Many Latinos reside in places that are nature deprived: a 2020 study by the Center for American Progress found that 67 percent of Latinos in the U.S. live in a nature-deprived area, compared to 23 percent of white people. And since outdoor participation as an adult is heavily dependent on whether you were exposed to outdoor recreation as a child, the result is that many Latinos don’t see a place for themselves in the outdoors.

To change that, Vámonos Outside offers programs such as Jugamos Afuera (or “Let’s Play Outside”), which offers summer outdoor recreation activities to youth in first through eighth grades. The activities ranged from bicycling, to cave exploration to kayaking.

Another program, Agua Frescas, is a week-long day camp in August that introduces Latinx and BIPOC youth to water activities such as tubing and rafting — and to careers in the water sports industry. The program takes its name from the refreshing fruit-based beverages popular in Latin American countries.

Through a blend of partnerships, sponsors and shrewdness, the organization manages to make the activities affordable for youth, said Heredia,

“To buy a kayak costs thousands of dollars, which doesn’t include transportation costs or a trailer to pull them,” he said. “So instead of buying our own fleet of kayaks, we just go to a resort on a lake, 40 minutes away from Bend, where we just rent a kayak for a few hours. It’s expensive, but for now, it’s what we have to work with.”

Heredia also said the organization has managed to get free ski packages and lessons for some of the participants, as well.

But while the financial piece of exposing Latinx youth to outdoor recreation can be daunting, so are the cultural barriers, Heredia said.

“The focus in Latino cultures tends to be on work, and that’s all that many people have time to do,” Heredia said, “or it’s on soccer and things like that. Also, the Latino connection to nature, like the African-American community, has typically been tied to working in the fields. That’s the image that many Latinos have of the outdoors.”

Heredia’s role is “to convince families that what we’re doing is fun and safe, and natural.”

One way the organization tries to ease Latinx youth and families into that mindset is by organizing short trips to nature parks — like what Heredia showed to attendees at the Inside-Out International Conference.

“We try to focus on activities that are easier to get folks out into,” he said. “But a lot of teenagers don’t like hiking because it’s walking, and they’re teenagers, and they don’t like walking, and they get bored.”

Yet that changes once the youth get into more challenging activities, he said. “Rafting was pretty intense, but they’re kids, and they’re really liking all the different ways to be outside,” Heredia said.

For his part, Heredia said he is determined to help more Latinx youth fall in love with the outdoors.

“I feel like every day, when I wake up, I’m on track to really try to change the culture here, to engage them in the outdoors,” he said.

“At the end of the day I am here to make a change, and that’s why it feels more like a mission than a job.”

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