You’re hiking in the forest and all the signs are shot up, there’s shotgun shells, there’s people shooting in the distance. But they’re also taking us through rural Oregon. So we went 90 days without our wallet, our IDs, nothing.

One thing that they did was take our IDs from us for the whole course. But I think at the end of the day that it wasn’t that much of a professional setting, that there wasn’t understanding towards other identities and people. My experience in the outdoors has never been in a professional setting. I felt pretty excited just to learn and to try new things and to have new experiences, like mountaineering, paddling on the river for weeks, rock climbing, backpacking. The community pitched in so I could get this education to help launch, and it seemed really, really exciting. So when it did, I was just like, Oh my gosh, I think this is gonna happen. I think for me, I just hoped it did well, but I didn’t know if it was really gonna do it. I think at the time it was around $7,000. If I want to run this outdoor nonprofit, I need to know what the standards are, how people are approaching it. So it was an opportunity for me to really grow. It was a 90-day instructor education course with one of these big adventure hubs.

I’m such a “now” person, so I’m like, “Let’s just do this now. In the beginning when I was starting Wild Diversity, I really wanted to have the actual hands-on experience with people guiding me and telling me, This is the right way to approach this, this is how to take a group out.

I am in Ellwood, Oregon, southeast of Portland. We do outdoor adventures and outdoor education for the BIPOC and the LGBTQ+ communities. I am the executive director and the founder at Wild Diversity. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I felt so much shame around it, because the community supported me. My whole dream of being outdoors, I was not feeling it. It has been edited for length and clarity.Īfter I got out of the course, I didn’t want to be outdoors anymore. Mercy M’Fon told their story to producer Sarah Vitak for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast.

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