Partners, collaborators, Friends

We are incredibly grateful to be supported in 2022 and 2023 by a grant from The North Face’s Explore Fund. We also are honored to have received a grant last year from Patagonia. Youth Passageways (501(c)3) is our current Fiscal Sponsor and provides generous organizational mentorship. We are also excited to be part of the Backcountry Trailbreakers program in 2022! Without these collaborations, offering our high-quality courses at donation only or or low sliding scale would not be possible.

We are influenced by emergent design and ecological systems. We recognize that we as community projects and organizations are stronger when we uplift each other in an ecology of liberation. We are humbled to have been able to call these organizations our collaborators, partners and hosts. 

Women's Wilderness

At Boulder Pride 2015 with Women's Wilderness

Our first grant-funded skill-share series was made possible through our partnership with Women's Wilderness which is a 501 c-3 non-profit based in Boulder, Colorado. Women's Wilderness, which historically has run groundbreaking outdoor programs for women and girls, is committed to expanding their vision of diversity, equity, and inclusion in outdoor ed spaces and we are honored to have worked with them on the vanguard of this project during our time in Colorado! In 2016, WW and Queer Nature received a small grant of $1000 from the Community Foundation's Open Door Fund which allowed us to run 4 skill-shares while only charging $10 per participant. Additional donations through WW on Colorado Gives Day allowed us to add two more workshops to the series while allowing us to keep the registration fees nominal. The following year, we received double the original grant amount, plus a small grant from the Wild Geese Fund, and were able to run even more skillshares. Our programming through WW was named the "Queer Wilderness Project," to differentiate the title "Queer Nature" for our own organization. We are truly grateful for this awesome partnership, and thank WW for supporting Queer-only spaces in their programming and promoting the importance of allyship in the outdoor field.

The School of Lost Borders

During the 2015 Queer Quest in Buena Vista, CO.

Pinar and So, two of the Queer Nature team, are trained to facilitate nature-based solo fasts, which we like to refer to as ‘community generated ceremony,’ through the School of Lost Borders monthlong guide training. We are also both alumni of the Queer Quest, an LGBTQIA-specific fast run by the School, and co-guided the School's first Queer Youth Quest in June of 2017. We occasionally still assist or support programs at the School and have several good friends and mentors there. Our experiences with this modern day rite of passage, further adapted for queer people by  queer guides at the School Rue Wharton and Pedro McMillan, was a huge inspiration for Queer Nature. We also deeply honor Meredith Little, Betsy Perluss, and Scott Eberle as incredible mentors and elders to us in this space.

We strongly believe that people in our society today crave somatic & ritual intensity. However, one person or organization’s conception of what this is is not always accessible to everyone else. After gaining some experience in these relatively extreme rites, we felt that in order for many people to have the internal resources to embark on multi-day journeys and experiences in the “wilderness,” and also to be able to integrate those experiences back into their everyday lives and communities, a needed piece was earth-based community and long term nature mentorship at home. One of our hopes with cultivating nature-based queer cultures is to impart to others the resources for them to be comfortable pushing their engagement with the natural world to ever deeper and more fruitful levels.

We send constant thanks to our guides and mentors at the School.