A Statement from Footprints
Our goal with Footprints has always been to help people. Climate change affects our lives and our communities in ways that are unique in human history in their scope and impact, and we believe in the goodness and beauty of people and our relationships. That’s why we focus on a sport like trail running: it represents on a small scale some of the beauty and hope and possibility of our world, and this model can help us come together for much larger causes.
But good intentions don’t automatically translate into good impacts. By stepping into a leadership role in the world of climate action, we at Footprints are taking on a huge responsibility to the people who are impacted by climate change. And the unfortunate reality is that although everyone is or will be impacted by climate change, the impacts are extremely unequal. Indeed, the ways climate change impacts certain groups of people over others are closely related to the ways our societies value certain groups of people over others. This complex history and its impacts affect people every day in ways that are not immediately obvious to people like Dakota and Nate, who run Footprints, because we are white men. Despite our best intentions, we didn’t have the education required to provide a safe, inclusive, and diverse experience to all of our participants.
We have always tried to work with mentors from diverse backgrounds and who possess a variety of skills and experiences. Previous camps had ten mentors, which naturally provided more opportunity for diversity among the group. This year we changed the structure of camp such that we had fifteen campers and five mentors, which change was motivated by a desire to improve the educational process and promote more group work. In theory, this structure can work well, but we failed to understand the inclusive impact that the diversity of the mentors had on previous camps. Although we tried to find mentors from diverse backgrounds, in the end four of the five were white people, and we did not prioritize diversity highly enough. From the beginning, this created a white space that had impacts on our non-white campers.
Footprints is a very small organization running on a tight budget. Dakota and Nate have done the majority of the work in creating the curriculum, which we then communicate to many experts with requests for feedback. Because we can’t pay ourselves a living wage, we are hesitant to ask other people to work for free, which is another example of how our good intentions nevertheless led us to cause harm: by not prioritizing a diversity of perspectives on our curriculum, we inadvertently – but nevertheless truly – created a curriculum that came from a white perspective and featured many overtones of white saviorism.
This skewed perspective steadily impacted the people of color at camp in ways that we didn’t understand. It all came to a head toward the end of the week, when the whole Footprints group traveled to a nearby town to spend the afternoon volunteering. Every Footprints camp takes one day each week to do some community outreach, and since much of Vermont was seriously impacted by flooding this past July, we thought this was an important issue to help with. We worked with a nonprofit in the town so that they could help us understand how best to help, and they guided our efforts with a series of tasks to help the community.
Because of our lack of education, we didn’t understand how it might make people feel to be removed from the safe space of the camp and taken to a different place to do volunteer work. Most of the group spent our time ranging down a riverbank cleaning up debris from the floods, and without clear leadership this could have put people in compromising positions with regard to the local people. From the town’s perspective, we were a random group of people cleaning up trash, and the history of American race relations demonstrates that it can be dangerous for people of color to attract attention in unfamiliar and predominantly white places. We also were taking photos with the intention of promoting volunteer work in general to our followers, but we failed to explain the intention of the photography, which led some people to feel tokenized and taken advantage of.
In a broad sense, one of our failures was not seeking and compensating guidance on how to safely and inclusively provide education on sensitive issues like climate change to a diverse audience. The Footprints leadership did not have the education required to understand the stakes involved, which meant we did not understand our own blind spots to the sensitivity of providing education to people who have experienced trauma. Another failure was not setting the correct boundaries for people: we should have explained better the goals and intentions of tasks like the volunteer day and the photography; we should have provided more clear daily schedules; we should have provided better explanations of each presentation and project activity well before they took place. Without the requisite education or clear-enough communication, we allowed the week to progress in a manner that did not give space to some of the most personal issues that arose.
To be fair, the week was not a total failure. All the campers made significant progress on their projects. Many people developed lifelong friendships. We ran on beautiful trails and danced as a group and shared stories both funny and deeply personal. We came together as a community and supported each other in many ways, and there were many moments of joy. From this perspective a few weeks removed from the experience, we believe there can be a way to organize Footprints the organization and its events such that these issues will never arise again. But this year we failed to provide the safe and inclusive space that many of our participants needed, and this is a failure that we take very seriously. If we are to truly address climate change, we must first support the people most affected by it.
My name is Dakota Jones and I’m the executive director of Footprints. Nate Bender and I founded Footprints and have been in charge of the organization from the beginning, and we take full responsibility for these mistakes. We also are taking responsibility for our response to these mistakes, and that response begins with acknowledging our failures, progresses to communicating with the people harmed and trying to find ways to create reparations for the harm we caused, and finishes with the work required to prevent this from happening again.
The third point is the one that will influence the organization for years to come. Our response to this has been to pause all operations of Footprints until we can re-evaluate our strategy and find a better way forward. This we have done, and we have been having many conversations with people who work in the DEI space. Our new strategy encompasses two distinct general actions:
Educate ourselves. We are working to find the right consultants or educators to provide a solid education in DEI work and trauma-informed education for everyone in the Footprints organization. This will begin with classes and self-driven learning for Dakota and Nate, but ultimately our goal is to identify some minimum level of education required for all Footprints staff, something that will be paid for by Footprints and which will represent a minimum standard of care for everyone we work with.
Expand our network of educators. We will create a board of six to eight people who will be paid for their time to review everything we do at Footprints. This will begin with a re-evaluation of the mission, vision, and theory of change of the Footprints organization, followed by an evaluation of the roles in the organization. This will continue with a re-evaluation of all the actions we take and events we organize. In the future, all mentors will be asked to provide their presentations months in advance of camp, and we will work with them to ensure they are sensitive to all groups of people. We will then develop project activities that will bring out the best in all people and their projects. Finally, we will provide documents to all camp participants with intricate details about what the camps will entail and how they will take place.
This has been an incredibly hard learning experience for everyone at Footprints. Many of the people affected by our failures at camp were very disappointed in us, and we’re ashamed of ourselves for letting them down. But we also believe that we can learn from this and create an even better organization, one that can continue to bring people together and create effective climate action projects that prioritize people as much as planet. With the learning we are now doing, we can create a model of what climate action should be, rather than what it might be already.
We have always believed in people and community. We now understand the stakes of the work we do and are determined to create a climate action space that includes all people. We want to offer a sincere apology to everyone who has supported us. We hope you’ll stick with us, though, because our mission to help people address climate change is worthwhile, and with the guidance of a larger and more diverse group of experts we hope to accomplish far more than ever before.