2024 Retrospective: In Divided Times, Nature Unites Us [Sierra Club]

The Sierra Club highlighted our partnership in offering outings to veterans as one of their 2024 highlights.

In the midst of another divisive election year, the outdoors continues to be a unifying force and a bright spot in a challenging landscape. The benefits of spending time in nature are many. For example, greening our neighborhoods can improve the quality of the air we breathe and ensure our kids have places to run and play. Getting outside in nature can reduce stress and improve our mental health. Recreating outdoors contributes $1.2 Trillion to our economy and accounts for 5 million of our jobs across the U.S.

We all deserve access to these benefits, but unfortunately far too many low-income and communities of color face barriers to fully and safely enjoying our shared public lands, including a lack of nearby nature, the availability or cost of transportation, and a lack of opportunities where we live, learn, work and play.

Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All campaign serves to ensure more communities can benefit from the transformative power of nature. Whether we’re engaging people on outings or advocating for policy changes, we’re making progress because of the incredible community of partners, supporters, staff, volunteers and members who all agree that access to nature is a necessity, not a nicety.

Uplifted Veteran Voices

Veterans play a unique and critical role in our outdoors work, as many are looking to continue their service after leaving the military and are finding community and purpose in the outdoors. With 12 Sierra Club chapters and partners across the country, we hosted nearly 5,000 members of the veterans and military community on outings. From Alaska to Florida, our chapters are partnering with groups like Healing Hearts, Guardian Revival, YMCA, and the Wounded Warrior Project to deliver the benefits of the outdoors directly to participants. In New York, we celebrated the launch of the Lifetime Liberty Pass for veterans. I also had a chance to catch up with our team in Minneapolis to learn about our work to connect unhoused veterans with housing and outdoor opportunities.

As our work expands, our Military Outdoors team decided to spend some time learning more from the veterans we serve and conducted a listening tour with in-person stops around the country and a virtual women’s session. The findings from our tour were used to produce the Outdoor Access for the Military Community Recommendations Report released earlier this year and shared with federal agencies and veteran serving organizations during a virtual briefing and Q&A session.