Antiracist Education for Action
Community-building through training, coaching, and consulting
Stephany Subdiaz & Ella Hartley
What is Green Wood & Duff?
Green Wood & Duff is a racial justice and equity consulting, training, and coaching practice focused on building antiracist community and culture across the outdoor industry.
Our mission is to redefine the culture of the outdoor industry from exclusionary, extractive, and predominately white to a culture that celebrates and learns from the experiences and leadership of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and people of other marginalized identities.
We are working for a world where People of All Identities experience joy, feel physical and emotional safety, recreate comfortably, educate others to recreate, and lead in outdoor spaces.
Why build antiracist community in the outdoor industry?
The outdoor industry is built around the myth that wilderness is “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act, 1964). In this imagination, humans exist separately from earth’s ecosystems; wild places are visited only briefly to be discovered or conquered by intrepid explorers, typified by white, male mountaineers. However, every person of every culture on our shared planet has ancestral connections to the natural world. We know connecting with nature is radically healing. And we believe outdoor education, recreation, and preservation communities are uniquely positioned to foster inter-racial understanding and young racial justice practitioners. Removing social, cultural, and economic barriers to outdoors spaces is beneficial for everyone.
Building multiracial community to dismantle racism and increase belonging in outdoors spaces is how we save the world.
What’s with the name?
Green wood is is alive, growing, bendable without breaking, and hard to burn. Duff is the forest floor, full of mycelium networks that connect the trees and soil in unseen ways. Both are necessary, interdependent parts of an ever-changing, adaptive, healthy and thriving ecosystem. The name was inspired by an essay in The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.
Read the excerpt
“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things — the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this — joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and everything we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.”
“‘Joy Is Such a Human Madness’: The Duff Between Us” by Ross Gay
Why work with GWD?
Green Wood & Duff supports culture change by challenging and supporting outdoor professionals at predominantly white outdoor institutions to identify and change patterns of implicit racism in their organizations.
The multi-racial, intersectional training team at Green Wood & Duff has over 20 years combined experience as outdoor educators, facilitators, and racial justice practitioners. We have worked or currently work at standard-setting institutions, and have refined the practices we use with some of the best outdoor educators and recreation facilitators in the industry.
What do we do?
Training
Organization-wide antiracism trainings specific to field, place, cultural needs.
Consulting
Support for organizational leadership and development
Coaching
Individually tailored guidance, tutoring, and processing related to antiracism.
Where do we begin?
We invite you to schedule an introductory meeting (vibe check) with us–a free 30-minute meeting to discuss if we can support your antiracism goals.
While GWD adapts our materials to meet different organizational needs, we are prioritizing longer engagements over shorter training sessions. Collectively we are many years past the unveilings and racial consciousness-building of 2020. Frankly, with love, we’ve done the powerpoints, you’ve done the power points, and if you wanted to do a powerpoint by now you would have done it. This moment calls for deeper work.