Outdoor Allies: Teresa Baker — Outdoor Alliance

Ever wondered how you can do more for public lands but you aren’t sure where to start? Outdoor Alliance’s Outdoor Allies series explores how other outdoor adventurers got their start in advocacy work and their advice for how you can harness your passion for the outdoors into advocacy for the land and water you love. Teresa Baker is the founder of the Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge, and an advisor for the Confluence Program at the Conservation Alliance, working to increase diversity and inclusion within outdoor brands and organizations.

Tell me about your relationship with the outdoors.

I grew up in Richmond, California, and have always loved to hang out outside. I have eight brothers, and when I was a kid, our parents would tell us to go outside and not come back in until the streetlights came on. We did a lot of hiking and exploring, I refused to be outdone by other neighborhood kids.

How did you get started in your work with the In Solidarity Project?

In 2015 or 2016, I spent a week in Yosemite Valley where I didn’t see one other person that looked like me. When I got home, I reached out to the Department of Interior and said, “You guys have a problem around diversity and people of color in Yosemite.” And their response was “We know, and it’s not just Yosemite, and we’d like you to help us fix it.” It was then I started doing this work on inclusion and the outdoors. Originally, I was just focused on Parks and it expanded into what it is now.

How have you seen the CEO Pledge evolve over the last few years? Where do you see it going in the coming years?

A few years back, some friends and I were talking about the best next steps [to improve diversity in the industry] and I thought we needed a commitment from the outdoor industry if we were going to move things forward. I reached out to Chris Perkins, because he’d been doing work on these issues. I told him I had this idea, and asked him to help me create it, and he said yes right away. We introduced the CEO Pledge for the first time publicly at Outdoor Retailer Show, we were walking aisle to aisle, talking to people, and sharing it with them. That first show was hard. It was hard to have these difficult conversations around diversity while people were focused on sales. We had a few other people involved, including James Edward Mills, and we didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t get much in the way of feedback after that show, but I do remember reaching out to Joe Flannery at Marmot and he invited me to come to his office and we talked about the pledge, and they were the first company to sign on. Hipcamp was the second company to sign on. It was still hard after that. It was messy.

At the height, it was 204 brands. Now we are at 180, because we had to remove some people. And about two months ago, we decided it was time to stop accepting new applications. It’s too much for two people to handle. Right now, we’re working with all 180 brands, doing collaborations, partnerships, on different campaigns. We’re helping make sure these brands are doing the work. You can’t just point to the pledge as your commitment, the commitment is in action.

The vision is to eventually do away with the pledge. It’s more important that people are doing the work. We don’t need more articles or panels, we need to be able to point to the work that people are doing.

One of the pledge signatories you’re working with is the Conservation Alliance, which just announced a new grant program, called the Confluence Program, dedicated specifically to funding BIPOC-led conservation groups. What led to your involvement with the Confluence Program? Can you tell me about the goals of that program?

A few years ago, I had a conversation with Conservation Alliance about its grants program. There are a lot of obstacles in place when it comes to grants. I asked them to consider some changes, like doing away with the requirement of being a 501c3 in order to qualify for grants. Then this year, Josie [at Conservation Alliance] reached out to me and said she wanted to develop a grant program and wanted me to help advise them. We brought on a committee of amazing people. It’s important that we hear additional perspectives, and that is what Conservation Alliance did with this program.

Funding is so vital to diversifying conservation. We have to expand the people sitting around the table, and my hope is that the Confluence Program brings new people to the table. We have to expand the narrative so people can see it’s not just one group of people involved in conservation—it’s not just white men and women around the table—it’s all of us. The goal is that people who have been unseen in conservation for so long are finally seen.

What do you think are the biggest problems that the outdoor community needs to face and solve in the coming years?

The outdoor industry needs to include more women across the board. I knew people of color were underrepresented, but we also have to address how many men are in the C-suite levels and how few women are there. Men have to address this. And women have to raise their voices even louder to say, “Why not me, why not now.” There needs to be a focus driven campaign on women in the industry. There’s enough of us to kick ass in this industry, we should be doing it.

I’m the only girl in a family with eight brothers. My dad always told me I wasn’t special because I was the only girl, and I shouldn’t expect the world to give me anything because I’m a girl. I had to get out there and kick ass to get what I want. I refuse to accept that some may view me as less than because I’m Black or because I’m a woman.

What do you hope the future of the outdoors looks like?

We definitely need more focus on Native and Indigenous voices. They need the opportunity to lead. Nobody knows how to manage the land better than Indigenous communities, and we need to sit down and listen to them tell us how to do it.

There are young people who are kicking butt, like Leah Thomas, and they have fresh, new ideas that we need to consider. I alone don’t have all the answers and I’m smart enough to know I need other people standing alongside me to fix things.

Lightning Round:

Favorite place to get outside: Avenue of the Giants

Another activist you admire: Len Necefer, because he’s funny as hell

Favorite piece of gear: power stations from goal zero (it’s a huge power box that charges everything from my computer to my cell phone to smaller gadgets and it holds power for days)