Y-WE gets Youth Outside. WTA is Proud to Support that Mission.
Y-WE empowers young women to be leaders in their communities — one of the ways they do that is by taking them outdoors. A strong partnership between Y-WE and WTA have had a strong partnership since 2015, helping thousands and youth and adults get outside.
Young Women Empowered — also known as Y-WE — has a goal that's clear to anyone from its name: It aims to offer opportunities to help young women — those who identify as women or girls or who were assigned female at birth — to gain leadership skills and confidence, and to become leaders and changemakers in their communities.
Y-WE is one of the most active and involved partners in WTA's Outdoor Leadership Training (OLT) program. OLT supports teachers and youth groups by providing resources and helping develop skills for safe and fun outdoor experiences. In particular, the program concentrates on providing support to underrepresented and underserved communities.
WTA has supported many Y-WE trips with gear, including snowshoeing trips. Photo by Katie Love.
Since 2015, Y-WE has collaborated with OLT for their Nature Connection program, which organizes outdoor experiences for youth to build their outdoor skills and confidence, weaving in stewardship and opportunities to expand their knowledge about environmental sciences, ecology, sustainability and similar topics.
Today, OLT also supports Y-WE's Grow, a paid internship program at Marra Farm in South Seattle, where participants learn about sustainable farming and food justice from BIPOC community leaders.
Through the partnership, WTA has held OLT workshops for Y-WE's outdoor leaders and mentors, as well as provided gear to Y-WE for their outings, like sleeping bags and pads for overnight trips, snowshoes for winter adventures and rain gear and boots for Y-WE Grow.
Y-WE has led 98 youth outings since their partnership began with WTA — the most of any OLT partners. Across all of these outings, OLT has supported 2,116 outdoor experiences for youth and adults.
WTA and Y-WE have both seen how these programs can impact the young people that participate in them. Jaydalen Blossom, a Y-WE Grow intern, is one of those young people.
Jaydalen became involved with Y-WE several years through Nature Connections. The program helped her gain a lot of insight — about nature, equity and herself.
"I learned to not only connect with nature in a deep and meaningful way, finding that connection with myself in nature, but also with other people and other people that look like me, are different and are not normally presented in outdoor spaces, which I didn’t quite see or didn’t know existed. I learned a lot about things in life that we normally don’t talk about. I was exposed to things that I didn’t know or hadn’t talked about before."
Since then, Jaydalen has been a part of multiple other Y-WE programs, including Y-WE Create — a summer camp to help youth explore and develop personal creative goals and skills — and Y-WE Write — a summer camp that shows the power of writing. In 2020, she started working with Y-WE Grow. Today, she continues to work in the Y-WE Grow program as the program assistant. What has kept her so involved in Y-WE?
"It just felt like a calling... I felt like I found my why here, being at Marra Farm, and the ways in which we learn," she said.
Stories like Jaydalen's make it easy to remember why this work is important, and both WTA and Y-WE are committed to these programs so that future youth can have the same learning experiences.
Over the past 8 years of partnering with Y-WE, WTA has been excited to see their programs grow, shift to meet community needs and create new opportunities. We've worked hard to listen to their needs and make adjustments to adapt our program processes to better help them. For instance, during the pandemic, when Y-WE was returning to Marra Farm for multiple in-person events a month, we adjusted our processes so Y-WE could borrow our gear for longer. This created less back-and-forth for Y-WE staff, and gave the youth participants more consistency during a difficult time.
WTA also partnered with Y-WE during the WTA's 2022 Emerging Leaders Program (ELP), an effort to help members of underrepresented communities develop outdoor and leadership skills. WTA's ELP cohort joined Y-WE at Marra Farm to learn more about their programs — how Y-WE is building a strong community of youth who care about environmental justice, all while growing culturally relevant produce to share with the local community.
ELP met with Y-WE in spring 2022 to learn about their programs and help out on the farm. Photo by MJ Sampang.
Throughout the years, WTA has collaborated with Y-WE to help their programs expand by writing letters of support for funding opportunities like the No Child Left Inside Act, sharing their stories and spreading the word about the great work they do.
Through partnerships and collaboration, WTA looks forward to continuing to support Y-WE and similar programs by reducing barriers and increasing access to outdoor experiences. We're excited to keep helping create and support the next generation of outdoor leaders and stewards.
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