Creating Integrated Outdoor Learning Communities: Race, Class, Ethnic, and Gender Diversity in Nature-Based Education

Reflections on HOW and WHY Through a Regenerative Justice Lens

Boukman Byrd, a co-founding teacher-owner of The Nature School Cooperative, preschool guide, and Wild and Free Education director, offers this profound insight: "Re-connecting humans to nature is like asking a fish to re-connect with water." This wisdom cuts to the heart of what we're really doing when we create outdoor nature-based learning communities—we're not introducing something foreign, but rather removing the barriers that separate us from our inherent belonging.

Building on my previous exploration in "Diversity Equals Health Part 2 of 2," I continue wrestling with essential questions posed by Jon Cree and Marina Rob in The Essential Guide to Forest School and Nature Pedagogy:

"How do we deal with uncertainty in the face of an outcome-based education system still firmly embedded in economic growth and a fixed mindset?"

"How do we work within an 'industrial-based' education to shift our own practice and influence those around us to be more empathic and 'community-based' in order to stimulate our inherent creativity and innovation?"

These questions have taken on new urgency as I navigate my own leadership transition and the vulnerability that comes with creating alternatives to systems we've outgrown. The climate crisis, deepening inequality, and ongoing struggles for racial justice demand that we move beyond either/or thinking about educational access. We need both/and approaches that honor complexity while centering justice.

From Immunity to Integration: Expanding the Diversity Equals Health Framework

My earlier post connected how nature preschools and forest schools boost immunity—a clear example of diversity equaling health. Now I'm weaving this principle with the Triple Wellbeing® framework emerging within regenerative learning ecologies. This approach integrates three core capacities (thinking, feeling, connecting) with three core practices (self-care, people-care, earth-care), generating nine interconnected competencies:

Awareness: self-awareness • social awareness • environmental awareness

Compassion: self-compassion • compassion for others • compassion for the more-than-human world

Action: resilience and agency • citizenship and belonging • rewilding and regeneration

This framework moves us beyond individual wellness toward collective liberation—recognizing that our healing is interconnected with the healing of communities and ecosystems. As Aboriginal activist Lila Watson reminds us: "If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

The HOW: Practical Pathways to Integration

Creating genuinely integrated Outdoor Nature Based (ONB) Preschools and Forest Schools requires intentional relationship-building that challenges dominant cultural assumptions. Here are three pathways I'm exploring:

1. Community-Centered Relationship Building

Following protocols developed by Integrated Schools, we begin with authentic relationships rather than programmatic solutions. This means showing up consistently in communities, listening deeply, and examining how our own conditioning shapes our assumptions about families, learning, and success.

As someone who has benefited from significant privilege—white, male, educated, economically stable—I'm learning to use that privilege responsibly rather than defensively. This requires ongoing self-reflection about how whiteness shows up in educational spaces and commitment to sharing power rather than simply sharing access.

2. Pay What You Can Culture

Moving beyond literal "pay-what-you-can" toward deeper community reflection on generational wealth, financial health, and multiple forms of capital. Working with leadership from the Nature Connection Network, we're co-designing instruments for individual and organizational self-reflection that illuminate true economic relationships.

This approach invites families to consider their ability to contribute while participating in something more transformative than fee-for-service transactions. It's about building solidarity economies that make regenerative education accessible to all while sustaining the educators and programs doing this work.

3. Alternative Licensing and Public Funding Access

Through the Colorado Collective for Nature Based Early Education (CCNBEE), we've partnered with legislators on Colorado Senate Bill SB24-078, creating licensing options for schools spending 75%-100% of time outdoors. Senator Janice Marchman, Senator Kevin Priola, Representatives Junie Joseph and Barbara McClachlan have championed this legislation.

This systemic approach enables access to public funding like Universal Preschool while maintaining the autonomy and creativity essential to place-based, community-responsive education. Within 5-7 years, public funding through UPK could replace philanthropic partnerships, making Pay What You Can cultures financially sustainable.

Confronting the Reality: Who Has Access?

Currently, outdoor education benefits remain largely inaccessible across racial and economic lines. According to the Natural Start Alliance's 2017 survey, only 3% of outdoor preschoolers are Black or African American and only 7% are Hispanic or Latino among 121 nature-based programs surveyed.

This disparity isn't accidental—it reflects historical and ongoing systems of exclusion that we must actively disrupt. Organizations like Gather Forest School in Georgia and Forest Schooled in Ottawa, Canada demonstrate that different approaches are possible.

Mycelium Cooperative: Living the Alternative

Through Mycelium Cooperative, I'm gathering community representing the diversity of SW Aurora and SE Denver, following an Integrated Schools approach with a ⅓ equity model: ⅓ tuition-free, ⅓ tuition-adjusted, ⅓ full tuition. This isn't charity—it's justice. It's what solidarity economies look like in practice.

Research consistently shows that students with meaningful outdoor play-based learning experience marked improvements in mental health, skills readiness, engagement, focused attention, cooperation, social skills, and communication. These benefits belong to all children, not just those whose families can afford private tuition.

Our commitment extends to living wages striving for parity with public school teaching salaries—essential for engaging, supporting, and retaining qualified educators. We're intentionally structuring as a worker-owned cooperative, developing staff into collaborative owners who have democratic voice in everyday decision-making.

Maintaining 1:6 teacher-to-student ratios while partnering with University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work and The ROCK Center enables whole-family support. Community partnerships provide expansive services meeting entire family systems, creating deeper impact through values-aligned work that strengthens relationships with communities impacted by poverty and marginalization.

The WHY: Toward Regenerative Learning Ecologies

Last week I witnessed spring's first goslings along Cherry Creek and South Platte in our watershed as beetle larvae completed metamorphosis. These natural cycles remind us that transformation is both gradual and sudden, requiring patience and readiness for emergence.

We're co-creating communities of praxis around Regenerative Learning Ecologies that center Holistic Indigenous Liberatory learning through multigenerational, multilingual communities surrounding our youngest learners. This work requires deep engagement with research and reflection rather than surface-level opinions.

Essential resources for this journey include:

• The segregated lives of preschoolers

• An overdue reckoning in indigenous education

• The secret to upward mobility: Friends

• How much are the right friends worth?

• Harvard research on childhood friendships and economic mobility

• Seven key takeaways from Chetty's friendship research

• How we show up: Examining cultural assumptions in integrated schools

Border Crossing and Belonging

This work requires what I call "border crossing"—moving between different communities, languages, and ways of knowing while remaining accountable to justice. It means recognizing that those of us educated in predominantly white spaces carry assumptions steeped in whiteness that impact how we show up in integrating schools.

The path forward isn't about exposure to diversity—research shows this can actually harm communities of color when not done thoughtfully. Instead, we're building authentic relationships and friendships that are mutually beneficial across race, ethnic, gender, and class divisions.

As I reflect on my own journey from 2016's "Pilgrimage for Hope" to today's Mycelium Cooperative vision, I see how regeneration requires both personal transformation and systemic change. We can't separate healing ourselves from healing our communities and ecosystems.

Growing Alternatives in the Rubble

Through ONB Preschools, K-8 Forest Schools, and Emergent Strategy Wildcraft Workshops for Adults, we explore perception, observation, interpretation, and reciprocity from human and more-than-human perspectives. Central to all age groups remains this truth: Early Childhood is "not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important."

This work represents what grows when something life-affirming emerges from the rubble of extractive systems. It's messy, vulnerable, and uncertain—and absolutely essential for the world our children deserve to inherit.

My blog posts serve diverse audiences—families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students, and community adults—covering the "Tangled Bank" (Darwin's enduring metaphor) of interests, initiatives, and networks that weave together when we center justice, relationships, and regeneration.

I invite specific engagement with the linked resources rather than initial reactions to titles alone. Deep, lasting relationships require this kind of careful attention to each other's thinking and learning.