Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement
About Wild Sky Adventure Learning
Wild Sky Adventure Learning is a Saskatchewan-based non-profit organization run by parents, teachers, and nature lovers. We are dedicated to creating experiential learning opportunities on the land & under the sky for children and adults. We facilitate learning that is adventurous, guided by curiosity, and exploratory in nature.
Background and aims
The purpose of this policy is to guide Wild Sky Adventure Learning’s policies and practices so that they support, promote, and engage the diverse people of Planet Earth and their ecological knowledges. This will require doing our best to decolonize all aspects of Wild Sky Adventure Learning, including eschewing all forms of colonisation, particularly extractive colonisation. We will practice affirmative, generative, and strengths-based approaches to policy development and practices in the field.
Working towards diversity and inclusion for Wild Sky Adventure Learning will include prioritizing the voices, experiences, and knowledges of: First Nations and Métis peoples, and those of the many diverse peoples often marginalized in Saskatchewan.
The aims of this policy are:
For Wild Sky Adventure Learning to be known and respected by diverse communities as an organization that offers meaningful land/place/nature-based learning experiences for children, youth, and families.
To ensure that employees are treated fairly and equitably.
To ensure no discrimination occurs within the organization’s practices.
To ensure that Wild Sky Adventure Learning practices social and ecological justice and inclusion.
Why do we need and want a Diversity and Inclusion policy?
Issues of discrimination and social inequality abound throughout many societies and sectors of societies. Land/place/nature-based-learning is no exception, as a result of historical and ongoing practices of empire and capitalism including neoliberal ideologies. Without an active, formalized and conscious effort to prevent and address this, Wild Sky Adventure Learning may potentially participate - including unintentionally - in discriminatory and colonizing practices.
Wild Sky Adventure Learning acknowledges that land/place/nature-learning is a valuable and important approach in the journey to a more sustainable world; it is fundamental to the survival and quality of life of many peoples and species, and vital to the restoration of diverse narratives now needed for planetary healing and flourishing. Land/place/nature-learning therefore needs to be for everyone and by everyone. Effectively incorporating and advocating for diversity will contribute to the advancement of land/place/nature-learning through attracting new audiences, practitioners, knowledges, and perspectives with which to support our communities.
We identify the following as potential discriminatory and/or colonizing issues in land/place/nature-learning, and how Wild Sky Adventure Learning can address, respond to, prevent, and/or carefully account for in its work:
The bias of board members and practitioners, which by its nature can be unintentional. This may result in the following problems:
a) Underrepresentation of different perspectives that ignore representation of different communities, and then generate conclusions said to be applicable to all (i.e., as if universal). This can centre and normalize privilege and erase difference and alternative understandings, experiences, and practices.
b) Misrepresentation: This is where privileged perspectives may create or perpetuate problematic assumptions and practices regarding those communities that contribute to stereotypes, misinformation, stigma and/or inequality.
Discrimination against or exclusion of people from linguistically diverse and/or minority or other diverse backgrounds. This can take the form of overt or active discrimination, or it could materialise unintentionally through systems that are not designed thoughtfully, and which can therefore be exclusionary.
Invisible norms and cultures that can make it challenging for those who do not identify with such norms and cultures to understand expectations and navigate expectations.
Our responses
Awareness and Culture
Wild Sky Adventure Learning commits to embedding and raising awareness about diversity and inclusion in our everyday practices and culture. We commit to continuing to identify, prevent and redress issues of exclusion, discrimination, or inaccessibility. We will seek to boost diversity among our Board of Directors and practitioners through succession planning in ways that will result in creative, transformative, innovative and unique perspectives being represented in Wild Sky Adventure Learning.
Communication
Wild Sky Adventure Learning will focus on issues of diversity, inclusion and justice in all its communication.
Wild Sky Adventure Learning will ensure promotional materials, including our website, does not discourage, and actively encourages, voices and contributions from diverse backgrounds.
Wild Sky Adventure Learning will collaborate with key stakeholders and partners to provide best practice in terms of accessibility to programs for people with a disability.