All photography provided by Jadele McPherson

We are preparing a new kind of leadership. Our vision social justice & environmentalism involves building new community spaces for youth of color.

Our Mission

In the 1960s my parents went to Vermont and Massachusetts, my Father to attend prep school, and my Mother on her first camping trip away from home. These experiences changed the trajectory of my parents lives, and also carried trauma from being rooted in ideology that privileged whiteness, and being upper middle class, which they nor their peers from home were not. As comedian John Leguizamo jokes about Fresh Air, these were spaces that replicated "what we never had in the hood" and therefore echoed inequalities that were left unaddressed. Our team is dedicated to sharing the beauty, values of protecting natural environment with our social justice work in Afro-Cuban arts, racial justice and community building with new generations. Empowering youth means exposure to new environments, and meeting those engaged with community work & culturally responsive, artistic pedagogies that can create an richer exchange of values, ideas and cultures. Our incredible team of artists and community workers will expose youth to a range of experiences in nature, arts and culture that is transformational.

What We've Achieved

• We share over 15 years of work as teaching artists & educators in Chicago and New York City

• We have worked in juvenile detention centers, with incarcerated youth, and youth in schools in some of the poorest districts in the Midwest & Northeast

• We have created performances with youth for over 15 years