Together for Brothers/Partnership for Community Action
Grants Awarded
The project vision of Trails for Boys (T4B) involves promoting health and equity among Boys and Young Men of Color (BYMOC) and their families in most impacted communities. Funded by the Opportunity and Empowerment Fund (OEF), the program focuses on providing these individuals with inclusive access to outdoor activities such as biking, ensuring proper equipment and safety measures. T4B aims to foster leadership among BYMOC, encourage their involvement with community partners, policymakers, and document their experiences to share with decision-makers. The program ties outdoor recreation to gender, racial, environmental, climate justice, transit equity, and mobility sovereignty.
Starting in 2025, the T4B program will run seasonal sessions focused on biking for outdoor access, skills and networks building, promoting healthy relationships and equity, teaching bike mechanics and road safety, encouraging healthy habits, and discussing environmental justice. The program involves in-person activities and online events for capacity building, encouraging children and families to participate in outdoor activities. Youth leaders will collaborate with T4B staff on curriculum development, logistics, outreach, and evaluation, liaising with community partners such as Bernalillo County, The Wilderness Society, and several others. Stories and narratives will be used as tools for bonding, healing, and systems change. The program will also create opportunities to affect policies on outdoor access and to allow participants to assess their neighborhood's current condition. Utilizing Strava for recording activities, participants will be urged to discover public biking lanes and trails, while healthy snacks and drinks will be supplied during group rides through a partnership with Three Sisters Kitchen.
T4B has participated with many other community partners to promote outdoor access with 1) Zero Fares for buses and paratransit with the city (including videos and promoting using public transit to access outdoors) impacting more than a half million transit rider each month, 2) hosting seasonal cohorts, circles and activities connected to outdoors including biking and hiking for boys and young men of color (as well as community activities like monthly neighborhood bike rides in collaboration with community partners) from most impacted communities linked to the health – behavioral, community emotional, financial, mental, physical, spiritual wellness – including building capacity of youth organizers to plan, implement and evaluate cohorts including documenting and sharing their stories through artifacts like asset maps, collages, PhotoStory, poetry, StoryCorps, videos and zines about outdoor equity with decision makers and 3) collaborate with city, county, state and federal agencies to promote community engagement and especially decision making with most impacted communities including the recent Bike to Wherever Day where T4B advocated for additional biking stations in the International District (which ended up being one of the most popularly attended) and Westgate neighborhoods. T4B has learned in the past two years of COVID and outdoor programming and advocacy to pivot and maximum the strategies for engaging most impacted communities which have led to the three achievements but we are integrating those lessons and also successes into the current and planned work including being integrated into the proposal. This also includes a special new collaboration with Working Classroom as an outdoor hub for locating our outdoor activities that are close to the bosque and many bike lanes and trails as well as access to storage for bikes and other COVID resources and outdoor equipment.