Welcome back, readers! Thanks for supporting our hardworking nonprofit heroes by taking the time to learn about the good stuff they’re up to out there in San Diego and Orange Counties! Today I am thrilled to share with you a conversation I had with Ben McCue, Executive Director of Outdoor Outreach. (This conversation occurred several months ago, before the COVID-19 outbreak, so some of the information might not be currently up to date, as many things have changed in the past six months.)

This is a fabulous organization that is taking a powerful, wise, and brilliant approach to providing marginalized youth with a much-needed lifeline. I am confident that there are some of you reading this post who will feel an irresistible urge to get involved with helping this organization achieve its mission after you see what these folks are up to. Read on, and be inspired!

* This conversation was edited for clarity and length. Images provided courtesy of Outdoor Outreach, shot by Eh Ler. *

Thank you so much for being willing to talk to me. Tell me about Outdoor Outreach.

Sure. We are a San Diego nonprofit. We’ve been around for 20 years now, and what we do is, every day we’re in and around San Diego County connecting youth to the transformative power of the outdoors through recreation and environmental education and stewardship. So, everything from surfing out in Imperial Beach to rock climbing at Mission Gorge to mountain biking in the Otay Valley Regional Park. And we work with about 50 different community partners…schools, other youth-serving organizations, health providers, county probation – anyone who’s working with youth who don’t have a lot of supports in their lives and could use positive connections to peers, to role models, and to the incredible environment that we have here in San Diego.

How did it get started?

Photo by Eh Ler, courtesy of Outdoor Outreach

It was started by a man who overcame his own traumatic childhood growing up and actually found a lot of positive connection in the mountains and through skiing…and he actually became a professional skier. His name is Chris Rutgers, and he became a professional skier but he always had in the back of his mind that he wanted to give back and create a program for kids that didn’t have a lot of support. And he used that outdoor engagement as a platform by which to do that. He came out to San Diego, and basically just started running the program out of his apartment 20 years ago, and then it slowly built up from there.

Where do the kids typically come from?

Geographically, we’re located in southeast San Diego, so we serve a lot of the kids in the urban core of San Diego, around southeast, the downtown/Barrio Logan area, and City Heights. But we actually serve youth from San Ysidro down by the border all the way up to Oceanside, east to Escondido, and then a few different groups outside of San Diego County. And we find the youth, specifically, by working with our community partners. We’ll work the school psychologists and administrators at schools who are identifying kids that might be dealing with anxiety or depression or social isolation, and need to connect in a meaningful way. And then we’ll also work with groups like county probation to run weekly programs in their juvenile detention facility, where we’re actually going in there, meeting up with the kids, and then taking them offsite to do things like mountain bike or rock climb or hike or go tide pooling. We work a lot with our community partners to find the youth who could use the most support.

That’s awesome! Do you have something every day, every week? How does your programming work?

We run over 500 programs a year. We’re kind of seasonal, so right now, in the late winter/early spring, we do a lot of hiking, tide pooling, rock climbing, mountain biking, snow hikes, snowboarding. And then we’ll transition in the summer to more aquatic stuff, when it gets hotter. We’ll do stand-up paddle boarding and surfing, snorkeling, kayaking, and even some multi-day backpacking trips out to the Eastern Sierra, which are great.

That is amazing. Do you have any particular success stories that come to mind?

I think that one of our biggest success stories is that over half of our paid instructor staff are graduates of the program. They represent, in a really authentic way, the communities that we’re serving; and they can connect with those kids in a meaningful way, knowing the backgrounds that they come from, oftentimes speaking the same language. I think that’s really important, especially kids who might’ve grown up in San Diego their whole life but have never been to the beach, and it’s kind of this inherently scary place, and they need to have supportive people with them that can help them connect to these areas on their own term as well.

And then, we have tremendous stories of success with kids as program participants in middle and high school and then going on to our Leadership Program -- we train them up to become paid instructors with us -- and then getting their paid job through that and then going on and working their way through college, for instance, and then coming back to San Diego and finding meaningful work opportunities. And then this community of graduates who are coming back as volunteers, staff members, donors…and that’s always amazing, to see where they are now and how they really want a stake in it, and give back the experience that meant so much to them.

How did you personally get involved?

I came to San Diego for its outdoors. I came when I was 18 to go to school here because I was in love with surfing, and I also grew up partly in Central America and so I wanted to be closer to the border so I could go to Mexico more often. From there, my first job out of school was working for an environmental nonprofit on cross-border issues here in San Diego, and just really saw the need to ensure that all communities have access to the outdoors. I thought that with my nonprofit background, I could really help others make that connection through a nonprofit like Outdoor Outreach. After eight years of working for Wild Coast down in Imperial Beach, I met the founder of Outdoor Outreach, Chris, and he basically recruited me to take over for him as Executive Director of Outdoor Outreach.

What makes your organization uniquely equipped to do this work?

I think [that] everyone at Outdoor Outreach is extremely passionate about connecting youth to positive supports in their lives, and we’re all really connected to the outdoors as well. So, I think it’s just those two aspects that really connect to the youth that we serve. We serve over 2000 youth a year. Many of those youth have never had positive experiences with adults in their life…so, I think [that] creating that one safe space where they can go after school and they can connect to a group of people that are really positive, and wanting to support them and really care about them, can be life-changing. And that transmit to our staff team as well, and so, it’s a virtuous circle, in that sense. I think people are all really driven here, and motivated by the work that we do and the impact of that work.

Why do you believe that this work matters?

I think it matters because it’s providing a critical connection to kids that might not have any positive connections in their lives. All the research in the world shows that people can be incredibly resilient in the face of challenges, so long as they have at least one supportive person in their life who believes in them and who can tell them what they can do and what they can be, versus all the messages out there telling them what they’re not, or what they can’t do. That’s the role of Outdoor Outreach…to be that one space and to provide those supports for kids who might not feel like they have a lot of opportunity in their life.

Is there one thing that you wish that more people understood, or understood more thoroughly, about what you do?

That it’s not charity, that it’s community change and it’s community building. It’s creating impact and supporting people in a way that then has an incredible ripple effect over all these other aspects of our community, from mental health, to physical health, to community health. And it really is connecting to a critical community need, versus if you just see the photos of what we do – smiling, happy kids doing outdoor recreation activities – it’s easy to put that in the nice-to-have bucket and say, “Oh yeah, that would be great to have.” But, in fact, when you hear the stories from the kids about what the impact is on them, you actually see that it’s meeting this critical need that is oftentimes a lifeline for these kids. And they’re waiting that whole week for that one day when they can go out on the program and connect to others in a meaningful way and see a strength-based sense of self that maybe they haven’t seen in the past.

Speaking about building community, for people who might be reading this and they know they should get involved in their community but they don’t know how to, or where to start – what advice would you give them?

Just get out there and look at – what is your skill set, and how does that align with the needs that you see in the community, and what are you good at and what do you like doing? We have over 100 committed volunteers that will come join our programs and will support our paid staff team, whether it’s going out to Cabrillo National Monument to go tide pooling with a group of kids that have never been out there and seen a sea star, to someone who loves rock climbing going out and supporting a youth who’s never done it before, and connecting with them in that way. For folks that are out there and are working and don’t have a lot of time to come out and volunteer, or have families, etc., donating is one of the best ways that folks can support the work that we’re doing.

What do you believe is the function of the nonprofit in our society?

The nonprofit is really the catalyst for addressing critical needs in the community that are not being addressed by either government or are not financially able to be addressed by a business. Oftentimes, nonprofits, we’re dealing with the thorniest issues in the community that government and the private sector can’t fix. It’s up to a group of folks to get out there and raise the issue, “Why is this a problem? What’s the solution?” and get people mobilized and committed to address it. Whether that’s pollution along the border, mental health issues, youth development, like what we’re doing – there’s so many issues out there that…need that spark of a nonprofit to get it going. You can see that throughout our history [as] a country, that it really has been nonprofits that have contributed to some of the most meaningful movements; whether it’s the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, women’s rights movement, etc., there’s always been organized groups that have really been the catalyst to bring the government’s attention to it and to get the generally public mobilized, and to know how they can act to support these issues.

What has been a challenge that you’ve come across, or something that’s surprised you in your work personally, in the nonprofit space?

As a sector, nonprofits are dealing with the most difficult challenges in our communities, and yet we’re expected to do it with the least amount of resources. That, in and of itself, is a huge challenge that we face as a sector. There’s kind of an assumption that, if you’re in this business, it’s a privilege to work full-time for a nonprofit because you’re not getting paid well. That’s one of the assumptions or myths. Or, that you’re not getting paid at all and that you’re just a volunteer. And so, I think that one of the challenges we face as a sector is changing that myth and being able to inspire folks to pursue careers in the nonprofit sector. You can make a good living and you can do really good work, and you can be happy about the work that you’re doing and the impact that you’re having, and you don’t have to sacrifice a career. There are careers in the nonprofit sector.

To you, what does it mean to be a visionary?

I think that being a visionary would be a person, or a group of people, that see a solution, a creative and innovation solution, to a problem that doesn’t have a technical fix. It’s thinking outside the box in that sense, but then also, to be a true visionary you have to be willing to get dirty and to actually make something happen. It’s not enough just to sit on the sidelines and dream. You have to mobilize people to actually take action and do those hard things needed to move things forward.

What’s in the future for Outdoor Outreach? What’s your long-term vision?

Our long-term vision is that someday, I’ll have a Leadership Program graduate take over for me. [It’s us] trying to scale up our work so that we’re serving more kids who need that support. I think one thing we’re looking at is working more with health providers, specifically the County of San Diego’s school districts, especially as more and more folks are realizing the need to address mental health issues. That’s one of the things we’re best prepared for…being able to work with a group of kids that may have underlying mental health issues, and connecting them to positivity and healthy activities and folks that can help them be resilient in the fact of those challenges, and then, confidence in their power to make a bigger difference in their communities.

If someone did want to volunteer with Outdoor Outreach, what’s the process to do so?

We have weekly volunteer orientations. You can check out the schedule of those orientations online at www.outdooroutreach.org, under the “Get Involved” tab. We’d love for you to come out in that capacity.

Readers, I can’t think of a better way to give back! To get to go outside, soak in the sunshine, have an adventure…and change a kid’s life forever by showing them how important they are, and how healing and inspiring it is to just go play outside with friends. I urge you to attend one of Outdoor Outreach’s volunteer orientations, or send them a financial gift. And if you do, I’d love to hear about it! Please feel free to comment below.

If you like the images accompanying this story and would like to explore how visual storytelling could help your organization share the heart of its mission, please visit my website, www.soulvoyagerstudios.com, or send me an email at soulvoyagerstudios@gmail.com. To receive each blog post in your inbox when it is posted, as well as regular content regarding visual storytelling and inspiring ways to make a difference in this world, subscribe to my newsletter below!

Helping Our Youth Discover the Healing Powers of Going Outside to Play - with Outdoor Outreach