OUTCHEA: Expanded Access in the Florida Wilding

Sometimes, when you don’t get help, you think you don’t need help.

I am a Black-embodied femme person, so I’ve been assigned strength, sassiness, and independence as an anti-Black persona, but the reality is, no one goes it alone. What used to feel like inevitable isolation has given way to an insistence on collaboration. I mean, I’ve been hunting these connections for years but I think I might have been too easily discouraged. Age (and maturity) helps to relieve you of the embarrassment of asking for help — of which you may have to inquire repeatedly. Enter Jared.

While I have oft repeated “Listen to Black Women” and “Trust Black Women”, last year I made “Help Black Women” a mantra and a call to action. Like, if you are a non-Black person, and especially if you are a White CIS gender man, then you’ve been assigned the role of actively looking for ways to help Black Women/Femmes. Not that it’s a transaction, but she/they will find a way to influence your life and worldview, positively. Jared Packard is an artist and skilled visionary who has just the right touch to distill the expansive nature of my practice into bite-sized portions.

We’re currently developing OUTCHEA and are in the submission process for seed funding. I wanted to archive an excerpt of one of our applications below:

“Developed in partnership with the Alachua Conservation Trust (ACT), this program aims to introduce Gainesville’s Black community to Florida’s unique natural resources by sparking intergenerational social cohesion and youth empowerment through educational forest walks that promote equity and accessibility of Florida’s state parks and local conservation areas, including but not limited to Paynes Prairie, Sweetwater Wetlands Park, and Devil's Millhopper Geological State Park. Kenya (Robinson) has modeled this series of programs after cognitive restructuring, a therapeutic technique designed to change negative thought patterns, in order to address the ongoing impact of Florida's history of segregation. By learning about the history of People of Color and the outdoors, facilitating fun, artistic photography activities with participants, and insisting on the exploration of the outdoors as a human right, (Robinson) will guide Gainesville residents in reimagining their relationship to the landscape they call home and collectively envisioning new futures that embrace community and the outdoors. 

This program will consist of three events, each one modeled after the three steps of cognitive restructuring:

1) Catch it: identify the default assumption ex. “POC don’t belong in the outdoors”

2) Check it: dispute the assumption with objective facts ex. “POC feel this way because of the history of segregation, but I can enjoy the outdoors”  

3) Change it: introduce new practices and share with others ex. “I regularly enjoy Florida’s landscape and invite my community to join me.”

- Jared Packard | February 2024