BLENDING WORLDS Lynny Brown and Barton Robison create opportunities for equitable access to nature. Althea Sterup
O
regon Health and Outdoors Initiative Partner Lynny Brown grew up in the city and had little interaction with what she thought of as nature. She says, “nature was something that other people did,” people who were more privileged and had more money. However, she remembers, “as a city girl growing up, I did have experience outdoors in the public parks or even the park outside of our apartment. We had a little green space and I would spend long summer days just digging in the sand and catching frogs and running around barefoot in the swampy, disgusting, muddy pond that probably had urban runoff in it.” Brown wanted to be a park ranger growing up, and though that plan did not pan out, she is now an advocate for the outdoors through the Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative, an organization designed “to connect communities to the benefits that being outside and spending time in nature provides,” while prioritizing working with groups experiencing health inequities. It proves quite difficult for some people to even visit nature. Brown says, “there are certain communities that experience more barriers or injustices in accessing the outdoors or natural spaces. For communities of color, it might not be safe to go for a run. For low-income communities, maybe there’s not a park within a 10-minute walk from their house. So there are certain communities
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that experience inequities as a result of centuries of economic exclusion and oppression, and being unwelcome into these natural spaces.” The Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative work to make the outdoors accessible to everybody. Most of their current projects work to create more safe green spaces, especially for kids. Brown is currently helping to build an outdoor preschool. Preparation included visiting outdoor preschools and playing with the kids. They showed her structures they made and she was “getting to crawl through them” as well as “running through the mud with them [and] finding salamanders.”
Barton Robison—co-Health and Outdoors Partner—holds a favorite memory of a project in which he and Brown were involved. In an effort to make the outdoors more accessible to Oregonians with disabilities, The Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative—partnering with Oregon Parks & Recreation, Adventures Without Limits, and Oregon Spinal Cord Injury Connection—hosted a camping trip for wheelchair users in 2018. Robison remembered a moment where 20 different people were out on a lake in kayaks during that trip and “it just started pouring rain on us,” he says. “But it was so cool. And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, this is
