While scrolling down your feed on Instagram this week, you may have noticed black squares or even posted one yourself. Instagram users were encouraged to caption their picture #BlackoutTuesday as a form of solidarity and online activism ignorer to amplify the voices of the black community.

Users posted the names and website links to local black-owned businesses and organizations such as Black Outside, Inc. The nonprofit focuses on African American youth in San Antonio.

“The mission of Black Outside is to reconnect black kids and youth of color to the outdoors through various programs and through different activities (and) trips,” Angelica Holmes said. Holmes is the executive director of Black Outside. “Anybody that has spent any significant time in the outdoors knows the free therapy that you can gain from just stepping outside. There's just so much healing that can come.”

Black Outside is made up of several programs, including Camp Founder Girls and the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project. Camp Founder Girls was originally founded in San Antonio in 1924 as the first camp for African American girls in the entire country. It remained inactive for approximately 40 years until Black Outside resurrected the program last year.

“Last year we served 30 girls,” Holmes said. “We had planned on expanding to 65 but had to change course due to COVID-19 concerns. Our goal is for our girls to leave our camp and programming feeling strong, brave, creative, and confident.”

The camp encourages young girls to reconnect to nature as well as their heritage.

“Sometimes we take them for a night hike and ask them, ‘Who else do you think had to night hike?'" Holmes said. “(The girls) have to make that connection between them and our foremothers and forefathers before us that had to hike as a way of freedom.”

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Black youth in San Antonio also have the opportunity to join the outdoors through the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project. It was founded by Ki’Amber Thompson in 2018.

“The goal of the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project is to create a space of communal healing for youth impacted by incarceration, to be able to process some of their police and incarceration-related traumas and experiences, as well as to reconnect to the local environment,” Thompson said.

Thompson said she was inspired to create the program after her own experience in the outdoors.

“I had various family members who were incarcerated and grew up on the East-West side of San Antonio neighborhoods,” Thompson said. “I didn’t have the space to really talk about what that experience was like for me, and when I got to college, I had these incredible outdoor experiences that I found to be really healing and transformative in unexpected ways.”

The youth are taught skills of healing through activities such as yoga, meditation, and gardening.

“A lot of that has been facilitated through partnerships with local organizations here (and) community gardens,” Thompson said. “We’ve been able to learn about gardening and learn about plants and soil, as well as thinking about the soil that we come from, like, metaphorically.”

Thompson and Holmes said the programs Black Outside offers are greatly dependent on funding. Therefore, they hope the support from the online community continues in order to reach more African American youth.

To learn more about Black Outside’s mission, visit its website here.

To donate or read more about Camp Founder Girls, click here. For more on Thompson’s project in honor of her family member, click here.

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