Transportation, economic and cultural barriers have put some recreational spaces out of reach to marginalized communities
The coronavirus pandemic has contributed to Portlanders’ heavy reliance on the region’s natural areas this summer as they seek entertainment and an escape. But these outdoor spaces, which also offer physical and mental health benefits, aren’t always easily accessible and welcoming for people of color living in the metro area.
Public land managers and outdoor advocates are teaming up to help marginalized communities overcome barriers to accessing outdoor recreation — and some see a brighter, more just future for our parks on the horizon.
One of Portland’s selling points is its proximity to nature and abundance of parks. The city’s Parks & Recreation department manages 279 parks, and bountiful natural areas can be reached with a 45-minute drive from downtown in just about any direction.
Since the beginning of the summer, visitor counts to these outdoor destinations have ballooned, with people itching to get out of quarantine to swim in crystal blue lakes and rivers, hike among the wildflowers, and climb forested cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Yet in recent years, more and more land managers and outdoor advocates have acknowledged that many Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and low-income Portlanders do not have the same access to these vital resources as everyone else.
One of the most commonly cited barriers among land managers and outdoor advocates interviewed for this article is also the simplest: figuring out how to get there.
Kady Davis, of the Forest Park Conservancy, said the physical distance between Portland’s famous 5,000-acre park and many of the city’s communities of color is a significant barrier for those who cannot afford a car.
“(Forest Park) is geographically located in a part of the city that is not accessible or doesn’t feel safe for BIPOC communities,” Davis said.
She also acknowledged that this is not an accident, citing the history of redlining, which not only forced Black residents into neighborhoods with fewer resources and often degraded environments, but also away from parks such as Mount Tabor and Forest Park.
“We can’t move Forest Park, but we can do everything we can to make the park accessible via different types of transportation,” Davis said.
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One way the Forest Park Conservancy planned to address this problem was with a carpool network that provided a shuttle service between the park and the East Side Industrial District, which has better access to transit stations. But, like many other efforts intended to make outdoor spaces more accessible for all, this service was put on hold due to the pandemic.
Despite this setback, Davis said she believes the pandemic has, if anything, strengthened the conservancy’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion work, the details of which were uploaded to on its new website in March. Initiatives have included an environmental jobs training program focusing on youths of color and culturally specific volunteer events.
While the pandemic has put some in-person inclusion efforts on hold, Davis said, “We’ve been able to spend time creating metrics and really focus on this work.”
Mark Ross, of Portland Parks & Recreation, seconded Davis’ opinion that transportation is a significant barrier to access for BIPOC Portlanders — especially when trying to access Forest Park.
When it comes to accessing Portland parks and recreational facilities more generally, his agency has identified other common barriers, many of which can be found in the bureau’s 5-Year Racial Equity Plan.
“There are a lesser number of parks and green spaces or recreation facilities in areas where many communities of color live,” Ross told Street Roots.
He also noted affordable recreational programs and facilities that are culturally relevant are also essential for improving park accessibility for these communities — and so is getting the word out about their existence.
Vicente Harrison, Portland Parks & Recreation’s security and emergency manager, is more familiar with the cultural barriers BIPOC Portlanders may face. Harrison is the first African American to become a Portland park ranger and believes too many Americans, especially Black Americans, grow up not knowing about the outdoor facilities that are out there.
This is why, when he became a park ranger, Harrison wanted to prioritize educating children from a young age about the outdoor resources available to them. He said that knowledge would then be ingrained in them as they grow up, making them more likely to “access these resources throughout their lifetime.”
To achieve this, Harrison wrote a picture book, “My Nature Exploration,” encouraging children of color to explore the natural world.
Beyond education, Harrison also believes it’s important for Parks & Recreation staff to know and relate to BIPOC and other visitors in the park, especially when a ranger has to enforce the rules of the park. “That way it doesn’t seem like anyone is targeting them,” he said, “but actually sharing helpful information.”
While law enforcement working among the city’s parks may be attempting to develop healthier relationships with communities of color, BIPOC Portlanders continue to experience discrimination including from fellow parkgoers.
There were 329 reported incidents of hate in Portland from July 2018 to March 2020, and 5% of those incidents took place in a park, according to Portland United Against Hate. The nonprofit’s director, Debra Kolodny, believes its recorded number of incidents is artificially low due to underreporting. Nearly 60% of people who reported the hate incidents are Black or Latino.
Mike “Bretto” Jackson, who is the performing-arts coordinator at the Rosewood Initiative, is also an activist and community organizer who has provided security for Black community events, sometimes in outdoor spaces. Jackson, who is Black, said that he has never felt unsafe in a Portland park but that some of the events he’s worked have “had some issues with white supremacists coming up to the park.”
Jackson is unsure what the city’s parks department could do to prevent this from happening, but he does believe there are ways to improve Portland parks. When the pandemic ends, he would like to see more callisthenic bars and equipment for exercising, as well as programming for kids, especially in the summer.
He grew up in 1980s Los Angeles, where his community often visited parks for playing soccer, football, boxing, calisthenics and more. He said he “learned how to do all kinds of stuff in the park growing up in LA. Out here it is a little different.”
Jackson added, “I shouldn’t have to ride around trying to find a pull up bar. I shouldn’t have to put my hands on the concrete if I’m going to work out.”
Beyond city limits, parks such as Clatsop State Forest, Mt. Hood National Forest and the Columbia River Gorge, along with countless trails that crisscross the Cascade and Coast mountain ranges, all make the region ideal for staying physically and psychologically healthy during the pandemic.
Barriers BIPOC residents face in accessing city parks also apply here but are even more difficult to surmount. Transportation and equipment costs can be greater, rules more obscure to those who are new to park activities like camping or who cannot access the information in their language, and the feeling of safety within your community harder to find in a white-dominated space. In the past decade, multiple advocacy groups have popped up to overcome these barriers, including Wild Diversity, Unlikely Hikers, Brown Folks Fishing, Outdoor Afro and others.
These organizations often offer multiple services to BIPOC communities trying to enjoy the great outdoors, including hosting events that provide transportation to parks and sharing useful information with their members.
There are transportation related efforts outside these organizations as well, assisting Portlanders to access the parks beyond city limits. Oregon Department of Transportation’s Columbia Gorge Express, which connects Portland’s Gateway Transit Center to several popular destinations along the Oregon side of the Columbia Gorge for $30, is still operational during the pandemic.
Oregon Parks Forever helps third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at Title 1 schools access Oregon’s parks via its Ticket2Ride program, which covers transportation costs.
However, these efforts alone are not enough to undo centuries of racism and decades of exclusion from parks. Predominantly white organizations also have to play a role, but even when those organizations make attempts to increase the diversity of outdoor recreationists, there isn’t always a clear path forward, and there can be racist pushback.
Gabriel Amadeus Tiller is the executive director of Oregon Timber Trail Alliance, a nonprofit founded in 2016 that relies on volunteers to maintain the 700-mile-long Oregon Timber Trail from the Columbia River Gorge to the California Border.
The alliance partnered with the Central Oregon Visitors Association last summer to address its lack of diversity. Its initial efforts to recruit people of color to join its board were unsuccessful, but Tiller said the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland have created a “renewed interest” within his organization to address the issue.
Tiller believes part of the challenge is that there is a lot of demand on a small number of people of color in the outdoor industry. He also thinks it’s a result of how intimidating an entirely white space can be.
“Just because we are all well-intentioned, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be that comfortable for a person of color,” he said.
This may also be the case beyond the board. Out of 100 respondents who participated in Oregon Timber Trail Alliance’s annual user survey last fall, zero identified as Black.
Even as the organization pushes for more diversity, some of its members have pushed back. After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Tiller published a letter on Oregon Timber Trail Alliance’s website in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and forwarded it to the group’s email list of around 3,000 people. While they were in small minority, Tiller said, some “vocal and very nasty” responses were sent and some members unsubscribed from the mailing list.
When asked whether his alliance has considered partnering with organizations that advocate on behalf of communities of color, Tiller said it would like to, but at the moment there are too few such organizations already responding to a surge of requests.
“It was already the case, and it is especially the case now, that there are so few organizations who are focused on working with people of color in the outdoors, that the demand on these few organizations is pretty high,” he said.
One such organization is Vive NW, which aims to increase cultural diversity in the outdoors through outreach programs and partnerships with companies and agencies, including the Oregon Health Authority, the U.S. Forest Service, Portland Timbers and REI.
Vive NW uses three core tactics to increase cultural diversity in the outdoors. These include its group outdoor events; its stewardship program, where volunteers plant trees and restore trails; and its outreach campaigns in partnership with government agencies.
While the pandemic has limited its events and stewardship actions, Vive NW’s founder and executive director, Jorge Guzman, said his organization is busier than ever translating and creating informational material for park agencies across the state. So far, Vive NW has translated information into 27 languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest, including a Mayan language spoken primarily in Guatemala and parts of Mexico.
“It’s not just translating the text of information that is available to the whole white community; it’s creating that cultural translation as well,” said Vive NW project manager Marielle Cowdin.
Cowdin said she would still like to see more Oregon companies, organizations and agencies look to groups like Vive NW, rather than subcontracting to check off a diversity, equity or inclusion box.
“Genuine relationships and partnerships” with those entities is essential to increasing cultural diversity in the great outdoors, she said.
Despite the history of systemic racism, there are signs that creating equity in access to outdoor spaces for marginalized communities is becoming more important to both land managers and advocates in recent years, and the pandemic may be accelerating rather than stalling this progress.
For one, the pandemic has had a way of illuminating areas where support for marginalized communities has been lacking. While Ross, at Portland Parks & Recreation, acknowledges the pandemic has disrupted programs, he said it has also “exacerbated a lot of inequities in all aspects of life.”
He said he sees “a bit of a silver lining in that the pandemic has shown the need for clear and effective emergency information to reach people whose first language is not English.” As a result, Parks & Recreation has posted thousands of multilingual informational signs in parks, in playgrounds and on trails.
This moment, marked by a pandemic and protests against systemic racism, also appears to be shifting perspectives within a large industry historically dominated by white community members.
“I think COVID-19 has really highlighted a lot of inequalities,” Guzman said. “I think the combination of the protests and COVID-19 have sparked this whole movement” toward increasing diversity in the great outdoors.
“It has been great to collaborate with agencies and see that they are genuinely trying to be more equitable.”
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