BLACK HAWK — Damian Vasquez was shy when he met with his group from the Outdoor Belonging Project for volunteer fire mitigation work in Eldorado Canyon State Park. So shy, the 15-year-old couldn’t get out the name of the town he’s from when his turn came to introduce himself to some adults observing the program. (He lives in Aurora.)
That was in May.
Three months later, at a party celebrating his work and that of several other kids from urban and rural areas of Colorado, he beamed as his leader, Huzi Mandviwala, presented Damian with a special award for all the times he sang and strummed his guitar for his group on their camping trips, and for wearing his sunglasses long after the sun set.
The mood among all of the kids who met Sunday at Lincoln Hills — the lush outdoor retreat built in 1922 for Black people to escape racism and segregation in urban settings — was jubilant.
But Damian was also a little sad, he said, because their time together was over and he’d met people he probably wouldn’t have met in Denver, and “a lot of inside jokes were made” while they were camping.
He loved the one about the oatmeal that was so gross it looked like a meal you’d give “a sad, sick, wet horse.” And for the first time in a long time, he’d felt like he could “open up, meet new people and get to understand them.”
But he saw the silver lining of the program’s end, too: He planned to meld the person he’d become during Outdoor Belonging with the person he is at home in Aurora and, with his new openness, introduce kids in his school to outdoor adventures.
For another kid in the program, Outdoor Belonging gave him a break from the heaviness of hard times at home, his mom’s battle with cancer. A third grew more confident in wilderness and on rivers. And one knew he was going to build on what he’d learned, hopefully by doing more things outdoors.
Over the course of four months, a total of 19 teens in two groups did an overnight orientation at Cal-wood Education Center and fire mitigation at Crescent Meadows with a Colorado Parks and Wildlife ranger. They got their Wilderness First Aid certification at Lookout Mountain Preserve and Nature Center. They did a five-day car camping trip outside of Steamboat Springs, where they biked, paddleboarded, hiked and had a cookoff with healthy vegetables, and an eight-day trip that included two nights in the backcountry, rock climbing and rafting the Arkansas River.
And they walked away being less afraid of people they don’t know, less wary about “the other,” said more than one parent in attendance at the celebration Sunday. Which is good, because among the core tenets of the Outdoor Belonging Project are healthy risk-taking, environmental connection and creating an environment where kids from all demographics can work together and feel safe and supported while celebrating each other’s differences.
Teens Inc. and Outdoor Belonging’s origins
A new report by the World Health Organization shows teens these days “are the loneliest people in the world,” because they’re spending less time hanging out with friends now than before the COVID-19 pandemic and despite living in a digitally connected world.
Loneliness has significant impacts, including depression and anxiety, poor self-esteem and body image, disrupted sleep and a tendency to live online, inside their phones, instead of seeking face-to-face interactions, according to the report.
Add a growing divide between rural and urban communities and a declining share of adults who say they can trust the government, cultural institutions or each other, and you have the perfect recipe for a widening rift between kids who don’t look alike, sound alike or act like each other.
But Teens Inc., in Nederland, which started as a youth services program in the 1990s and transformed into three schools, two summer youth employment programs and a variety of other programs supporting kids in the 30 years since it was founded, has been using the outdoors to bridge the divide between urban and rural youth for more 15 years.
Through the mid-’90s, Nederland Youth Services ran teen centers in different locations throughout the quirky mountain town (pop. 1,200 then and 1,500 now) about 20 miles southwest of Boulder. But there was more need than space and little cohesion, so in 1997, a resident founded Teens Inc., to provide youth services through the town government.
Now the nonprofit reaches 700 people annually across the Peak to Peak Region, a 55-mile stretch connecting Estes Park to Black Hawk along Colorado 119 and 7. It runs two schools — one in Nederland for kids at risk of not graduating; another for incarcerated youth, in Golden. And it operates a preschool, three youth employment programs, outdoor leadership and recreation opportunities and a good old-fashioned (substance-free, safe, inclusive) place for teens to hang out where youth voices are valued, high expectations are upheld, honesty is prioritized and fostering a belief in possibilities despite potentially challenging circumstances is paramount.
Not bad for having an operating budget of $5.2 million.
But what executive director Stephen LeFavier, Ariel Gustafson, out-of-school time director, and other Teens Inc. leaders are giddy about at this moment is a grant they were awarded from the Denver Foundation and inclusion in the first cohort of 15 community-based organizations that are implementing “high-quality bridging initiatives” across Colorado, through the Belonging Colorado initiative, which is allowing them to do the Outdoor Belonging Project.
Belonging Colorado aims “to bring people together in new ways, grow resilience in our state and expand Coloradans’ sense of who belongs.”
Which, it turns out, is exactly what the Nederland nonprofit does.
A larger history of inclusivity
But first, a little more context.
Those 15 years Teens Inc has been bridging the rural-urban kid gap? They’ve done it through outdoor work projects.
Their TeamWorks program is a joint venture with Lincoln Hills Cares, a philanthropy created by billionaire Robert F. Smith in 2016 to give people who might not otherwise have them opportunities to connect with nature, and to encourage discussions about cultural history, natural sciences, the environment and outdoor recreation “through dynamic and culturally responsive curriculum with elements that meet state academic standards.”
Smith, who was born in Denver and attended East High School, is also the founder of the Fund II Foundation, which partnered with the National Park Foundation to create a civil rights historic preservation program that protects and enhances national parks and landmarks tied to civil rights history.
He’s done a host of other major philanthropic projects to help Black communities across the U.S.
And he owns a big chunk of property at Lincoln Hills, which was founded as a “sanctuary of resilience and progress” for Black people weathering segregation in the 1920s by Denver businessmen E. C. Regnier and Roger E. Ewalt.
The Lincoln Hills Country Club prospered in that capacity, attracting guests like Duke Ellington and Zora Neal Hurston, and offering small building lots to families who could afford them, reportedly for $5 to $100. It held a summer camp for Black girls and brought in travelers from across the country. But it struggled during the Depression and shuttered in 1965, as integration opened other outdoor spaces to African Americans.
Fast forward several decades, during which time some people held on to their lots and the James P. Beckwourth Mountain Club bought the Winks Lodge on the property from the Denver Historical Society (now History Colorado). A year later, in 2007, Denver investor and philanthropist Matthew Burkett bought his own lots, and he and Smith began turning Lincoln Hills into a private fly fishing resort. Some people have reportedly held onto their lots as the exclusive club has grown around them.
But Lincoln Hills wanted to continue helping under-represented communities. So 2010, it approached Teens Inc. for support in developing a conservation-based youth employment program that brought together rural and urban youth to work on the property, LeFavier told The Colorado Sun in an email.
“In about four weeks, Teens Inc. put together a program that hired three youth from Denver and three from Gilpin County,” LeFavier wrote. The program has since grown to 78 youth (half urban and half rural) ages 16 to 21 hired this year at $19 an hour for team members and $19.50 for leaders to do critical conservation work in Front Range and mountain communities.
TeamWorks was the blueprint for the Outdoor Belonging Project, which is funded by a two-year Outdoor Belonging grant, LeFavier said. “I don’t exactly know the merits we were chosen on, but out of 330 applications, 15 were selected.”
What he does know is TeamWorks works.
“Over 15 years, we’ve seen that when you bring young people together from different backgrounds and have them work side by side, they break down stereotypes and they form strong relationships,” he wrote.
“These relationships last, and more often than not, the youth come back year after year. The urban youth get to experience the outdoors in a way that is meaningful and productive while the rural youth, who may have some experience in the outdoors, get to meet and form strong relationships with young people of color who they otherwise likely would not.
“It is incredibly powerful on so many levels. This is what we are trying to replicate with middle school youth through the Outdoor Belonging Project.”
“I got to hear the outside nature”
Marcus “MJ” Jiner, a soft-spoken 14-year-old from the Montbello neighborhood in Denver, said his favorite part of the project was the five-day car camping trip to Steamboat Springs, where the kids did cold water plunges, gravel biked around Steamboat, went to the botanic gardens, paddleboarded and had a vegetable-chopping challenge with jicama and yucca.
Hendrix Matthews, a 13-year-old from Green Valley Ranch, said his favorite part was learning wilderness first aid, which he is going to use to advance his plan of becoming a lifeguard, a good-paying job for a teenager, he said.
And Camille LeFavier, Stephen’s daughter, loved backpacking, because “my family rafts a lot, but my dad’s not into backpacking.”
But another goal of the program was to create the kind of tight-knit group experience only these kinds of adventures can, because they’re filled with fun, sure, but also challenges and, sometimes, adversity.
In the 20-page Outdoor Belonging Project manual Gustafson and outdoor leadership program director Rebecca Burns wrote for the program, the “Group Capsule” graphic shows some of the key components for building a positive group dynamic.
Participants had to have their basic needs met. They needed physical and emotional safety. They needed clarity of expectations and boundaries as well as open communication. And perhaps most important to this particular program, they needed an atmosphere that fostered a sense of belonging and ownership.
Vanessa Matthews, Hendrix’s mom, said all of those things, and especially the sense of belonging and ownership, were accomplished. She is currently going through chemotherapy for cancer, and wanted Hendrix to do the project because she isn’t operating at her normal outdoorsy level. She has also done equity, diversity and inclusion training professionally. And she said “the program kept Hendrix motivated and excited for the next thing throughout the summer.”
“It was actually the best program I’ve ever heard of,” she added.
“And having the group from the city and the country kids, I think that is absolutely a beautiful blend. They can learn from each other, and not be afraid of each other. There was no, ‘I don’t have to be afraid of you, you’re from the city.’ Or you look different, you act different, or whatever.”