According to Natural England, black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds account for about 1% of visitors to national parks despite making up 18% of the general population. One of Patagonia’s core values is justice—to be just, equitable and antiracist as a company and in our community—so we set out to rectify this inequality in the outdoors, working towards achieving Goal 10 of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: reduce inequality within and among countries. Our first step on this journey was to better understand how we could make the outdoors more accessible and relatable for people of the global majority.

We recognized that this was a challenge Patagonia could not solve on its own. An industry-sized problem required an industry-sized solution. In a bold move, Patagonia united industry leaders to discuss a path forward, including some of its biggest competitors in the category: The North Face, Adidas Terrex, Vivobarefoot, and Arc’teryx.

Together, we set out to reform the industry from top to bottom. This meant not only getting big outdoor brands and institutions to commit to change, but also taking a grassroots approach, empowering the people doing the work on the ground to make the outdoors more inclusive.

To unify our organizations and our efforts, we created OUTO—Opening Up The Outdoors—an industry-wide not-for-profit initiative focused on creating opportunities of inclusion, education, and enjoyment of outdoor spaces for people of the global majority, led in collaboration with outdoor community leaders and OUTO co-founders Phil Young and Keme Nzerem.

For two years we studied the barriers keeping people of the global majority away from the outdoors and the drivers that would lead them to it. Speaking to dozens of consumers and cultural experts in cities across Europe, we uncovered the problem behind the inequality: the outdoors is an insiders club.

For this audience, outdoor sports were exclusively for white, heterosexual men. It’s a perception reinforced by search results for “the great outdoors”, films about adventurists, and even brands themselves, who too often perpetuate the notion that there is no space for diversity in the outdoors.

But these perceptions were also the reality. Racism and microaggressions persist within the outdoor community, on trails, in gyms, and on social media. We needed to do more than just change how the outdoors is portrayed. We needed to change the outdoor industry’s point of view of the outdoors: from exclusive to inclusive.

The OUTO initiative features two key ways of creating tangible change in the outdoors:

/ The five-step Online Allyship Commitment for brands and organizations

/ The Changemaker Programme designed to provide expert-led mentorship and grant funding to outdoor community leaders from diverse backgrounds who are working to build a more diverse, equitable, and anti-racist outdoor community

For year one of OUTO, we started by reaching out to other organisations across the industry to rally partners and allies for OUTO, asking them to join our founding partners and our Online Allyship Commitment.

We also opened applications for our Changemaker Programme in partnership with Hatch Enterprise, inviting diverse outdoor community leaders to apply for our inaugural class.

At the conclusion of the first class of the Changemaker program, we finally announced OUTO to the world through PR, the website, and social media, building momentum for year two of the initiative.