Nurtured in Nature is a new BIPOC outdoor wellness program, organized and directed by Tomas Delgado and facilitated by Healthy Champaign County, that invites Champaign-Urbana’s BIPOC community members to spend some time on easy hikes, meeting new people and learning about the environment.
I recently spoke with Delgado about what Nurtured in Nature offers, and what the future of this year-long grant-funded project could be. It was a rich conversation about the history of natural preserves in our area, community building, and what and who nature is for.
You can follow Nurtured in Nature on Instagram for updates and information about future events (also discussed in our interview below). If you’d like to support the program through donations or volunteering, you can contact Healthy Champaign County.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Smile Politely: What is Nurtured in Nature, and how did it come about?
Tomas Delgado: Nurtured in Nature is a BIPOC nature-based wellness and public health initiative that has goals that are aligned with active living, but it is not meant to be a jog or a run or an actual hike, it’s really just a stroll with people and we just talk and connect. In fact it’s not even especially centered around environmental education; it’s part of it, it comes up in conversation. It’s more geared towards just connecting with each other.
We facilitat[e] connections for folks of color to the outdoor and natural areas of the county and surrounding [region]. I was motivated after a focus group I did on behalf of the Champaign County Forest Preserve District in 2022, following a successful referendum campaign. They wanted to reach out to the precincts of color that participated in that referendum, to ensure that resources and programming the district was conceiving were designed with the interests of precincts of color. They sought a grant and were awarded the funding, which allowed them to fund my work in facilitating a focus group convening community members of color with various comfort levels and engagement levels with the outdoors. We had some great conversations at Homer Lake in June 2022 where we discussed our experience levels in the outdoors, or initial memories in the outdoors, recommendations for forest preserve districts, park districts, and other land managers, to ensure that they’re offering resources that are aligned with the interests of people of color.
And then we talked about some of the less appealing and dangerous experiences that folks of color have experienced, or know of other people experiencing, within the outdoors. There’s a long-standing legacy to avoid the areas and locations of a number of our natural areas, because of the associations with those communities that folks of color have, which comes at the cost of avoiding the natural areas of our county, something we all pay taxes to. Homer Lake is a beautiful gem. It is a gorgeous place to go to; it’s also located in a former sundown town, as are all of the parks in Mahomet.
This is a project born out of addressing those barriers. I approached Healthy Champaign County to see if they would be a host for the funding that was being offered through the Department of Human Services, the Healing Illinois grant. The grant wasn’t dispersed until January of this year, so that’s when we announced the project to the public. We didn’t actually start our activities until March. So it’s still fairly new, but it’s a year-long effort we’re hoping will be continued after the funding is over.
SP: How did you become interested in outdoorsy or nature stuff?
Delgado: I’ve had a lot of rewarding experiences growing up, but I wouldn’t say I grew up in an outdoorsy home. It wasn’t until later in life when I developed a curiosity and an appreciation for natural environments. My undergraduate degree is in geography and I got really interested in the land use trends of agriculture and conservation, and how they intersect and conflict with each other, which really pulled me to appreciate what little conservation areas Illinois has left. It’s sad to see how much growth agriculture and development has had at the expense of our natural areas, so I developed more of a fervor to defend natural areas, which then led me to my current academic pursuits [in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois]. I pulled out of my Geographic Information Science graduate program to focus on environmental sciences.
I’m really interested in the natural cultural history of Champaign County, knowing that there were legacies of indigenous communities that have tended this land, and so many of the natural elements that we have in forest preserves are thanks to them and their stewardship.
[I’m interested in] developing a deeper appreciation for the role that humans can have in natural areas — and for what we can all do right now to ensure that they are conserved, protected, and restored — [knowing that] within those movements there’s been an unfortunate lack of diversity. Diversity’s really necessary not simply from an equity standpoint — although that’s really important — but we need a range of ideas, we need a range of perspectives. It’s actually critical at this point that we have as many [people from different] walks of life as possible thinking about this. It’s a deficit not to have a diverse set of perspectives and it will ultimately fail us if we don’t. What’s at stake is kind of everything. There is a motivator that this is not just an equity effort. This is a mitigative effort for climate change.
Having a comprehensive relationship with nature is part of that. [BIPOC] communities are nature-deprived, language that the 2020 Nature Gap Report uses, which overviewed the disparities within BIPOC communities around natural areas accessibility. In Illinois at the time of that study, 77% of communities of color were nature-deprived, versus 21% of white communities. That is the nature gap, and that’s a significant gap.
SP: I’m thinking about trauma and working to heal from trauma, but going to many of these locations in historical sundown towns that could invite more trauma is really fraught. Have there been conversations with the forest preserve and the park districts about that?
Delgado: Those conversations have not taken place. I’m hoping that after this year’s work we can have more intentional conversations with our forest preserve districts, with our park districts, with the University of Illinois and all of the conservation organizations that exist within this region to talk about ways in which we can create a more cohesive and collaborative effort to address equity.
To speak on the trauma associated with those communities, it’s challenging because we can’t lift those parks up and move them, so it’s going to be a slow process. I’ve consulted folks here in this community who are trauma experts and their feedback was that my approach is actually quite backwards: That inviting people who may have trauma of those areas to go out there, with an organization they’re not familiar with, with someone they don’t know, in an area that is far away from their home, in an area that might have questionable cell phone service, is a lot to ask anyone who has some deeply held trauma.
I do keep that in mind, but this effort is also for people who have maybe already overcome some of that trauma and have a curiosity. We’re doing so together, within that safety network in cooperation with the landowners and other relevant partners. It’s also a means of uplifting and highlighting the outdoor leaders of color who do want to go, and celebrating their existence in those spaces, documenting them, and having that serve as a paradigm or narrative shifter.
SP: What sort of programs does Nurtured in Nature offer?
Delgado: Right now our main events are our hiking events, which are seasonal. We’ve scheduled four. June 22nd [was] our summer event at River Bend Forest Preserve, we had our first hiking event at Homer Lake in April. That’s where we made a short documentary, uplifting the testimonies of some of those hikers and wrapped it up into a nice little five minute video. We have our fall hiking event scheduled for October 6th at Allerton, which will be followed by a community mixer open to the public who are interested in listening to a panel of outdoor enthusiasts, experts, and hobbyists of color. Our last hike is in the winter — we don’t have a date just yet — but it will be at Busey Woods in Urbana, then we’ll hang out at the Anita Purvis Nature Center for cocoa afterwards.
There are small little impromptu hikes in between. I’ll be collaborating with the Urbana Arts and Culture Program for one pop up hike at Busey Woods for the CU BIPOC Artist Collective [on July 18th].
SP: Take me through a typical hike. What should attendees expect or what should they prepare for?
Delgado: Certainly prepare for the season and its associated weather. We are able to provide some provisions for safety and we usually have snacks and water. These are rain or shine or snow events, barring catastrophic thunderstorms and things like that. They are otherwise very casual. We’re not hiking on strenuous or advanced trails. We’re walking at a leisurely pace, or talking and chatting. And if you don’t want to hike, there are people at our base camp who are there just to hang out with you. So if you don’t want to make it past the parking lot, that’s all good, you don’t have to. Every site is meant to be a nice experience if you just stayed in the parking lot.
The other expectation is that this is BIPOC only. Volunteers are white, because they are made up of board members of Healthy Champaign County, but the folks on the trail with us are all identifying as BIPOC. [The hikes] are really just meant for you to make friends, connections, and develop a relationship with nature in a way that is relevant to you.
SP: And it’s free.
Delgado: 100% free. We have allotted funding for folks who are low income. We have supporting stipends for anyone with an EBT card, TANF card, or is collecting SSI or SSDI, $50 a hike. We have a certain amount for each hike, so once they’re exhausted we won’t be able to fund anymore. In addition, we offer transportation. We carpool from campus to each site, day of, and can get you back to campus whenever you’re ready.
SP: How do you see this program fitting in with other supportive organizations and events for BIPOC communities in Champaign-Urbana?
Delgado: I was able to table on Juneteenth at Douglass Park and that fit in really nicely to the list of resources that were being directed towards folks of color. In terms of community resources that are addressing equity barriers, I think it fits right in. In terms of resources that are specifically focused on nature or the outdoors, it’s still fairly novel, given the history of efforts like this within this community. Not to say that there hasn’t been, but I’m not aware of them and the collaborators that I’ve spoken to — park districts, forest preserve districts and folks in the community — are not aware of any kind of historical efforts for this kind of purpose.
It’s still new and I would love to see it supported collaboratively. Healthy Champaign County is kind of an inter-organizational non-profit; it’s completely volunteer led. Each member is representing other sectors within our community: public health, transportation, kinesiology, agricultural production, community gardening. We kind of have a diverse set of expertise and competency levels and it’s a great framework for creating projects like this, but it requires continued investment and collaboration.
SP: What are your ambitions for Nurtured in Nature and what do you hope it looks like in a year, or three years? What’s your dream for the program?
Delgado: Our hope is that through this year-long effort we can develop a framework for other institutions and organizations to either continue to invest in this mission, or figure out another way that this work can continue on. Healthy Champaign County is a 501c3, so we are certainly equipped to manage funding and we have volunteer staff capacity. Just as our county has food equity or food access coordinators, [I’d love to see] a position for someone to lead this work — through Healthy Champaign County or another institution — who could serve as a point person to liaison folks of color to our natural areas and also bring elements of our natural areas to the interior of Champaign-Urbana. Basically: Somewhat of an institutionalization of the effort, but also one that is nimble enough to just be really grassroots and quickly organize a pop up hike, not something clunky or…
SP: Mired in bureaucracy?
Delgado: Right. One that is resilient and ready to talk about our painful histories within this community as are associated with nature. While we don’t focus on that — I do not think it would be trauma-informed to start talking about all the atrocities that have taken place in the outdoors for people of color — it’s certainly in the back of our minds, we know it’s there. There has to be a space for us to process that, because if we avoid it, we’re not healing from it, and we’re not actually reporting connections at that point. I don’t want to be lofty or too whimsical, but nature’s not really a recreation. You’re part of it. You’re a part of nature and we need these connections to be able to live full lives.
SP: How can people support this initiative?
Delgado: You can get the word out that it exists. You can attend Healthy Champaign County’s monthly member meeting, you can reach out to me for volunteer roles. HCC can receive donations [earmarked for Nurtured in Nature]. Accessible ways to participate are to do research around this particular topic. It doesn’t necessarily need to be action-oriented or participatory, but making room to do some of the learning to look at the history of this issue is a form of volunteering.
Learn more about Nurtured in Nature on Instagram.
