Values

The Collaborative engages in values-aligned partnership opportunities and relationship-building that increase the Collaborative’s impact and reach.

The Collaborative is driven by the following core values, and is committed to a collaborative approach that fosters diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.

Collaboration

As our name suggests, collaboration is more than a label—it’s a foundational value that guides everything we do. We believe in the transformative power of bringing together researchers, practitioners, participants, and diverse stakeholders from both academic and community settings. Our approach is intentional: we honor connection by fostering a supportive and inclusive community that celebrates diverse perspectives, values shared input, and prioritizes relationships. In this spirit of collaboration, we welcome partners who engage openly, exchanging feedback with mutual respect, care, and a commitment to collective growth.

Key Collaborative Practices

  • Establish Group Norms: Create and uphold norms that cultivate safe, brave, and accountable spaces for authentic dialogue and engagement in our meetings and in our work together.
  • Quarterly Collaborator Meetings: Hold quarterly meetings to discuss ongoing work, share research and practice updates, and celebrate contributions from all members.
  • Research and Grant Partnerships: Collaborate on research projects, grant applications, and conference presentations to advance shared goals.
  • Outreach and Networking: Build connections with other organizations engaged in similar work to expand our impact and foster broader collaboration.
  • Align Research with Values: Ensure that our research methods and collaborative practices reflect our core values and demonstrate true partnership in both process and interactions.

Transparency

At the Collaborative, we strongly believe that transparency in research and practice is not just important but essential. It's the cornerstone of our ethics, risk management, and participant care. We are open about the values and processes that guide us, as well as how we fund, conduct, and report research. We invite critical feedback because we see it as a catalyst for growth and improvement and a testament to our commitment to transparency.

Key Transparency Practices

  • Ethical Research Standards: Ensure all research is IRB-approved, prioritizing participant rights, informed consent, and ethical considerations at every stage.
  • Integrity in Peer Review: Uphold ethical standards throughout the peer-review process, ensuring fairness, objectivity, and accountability.
  • Conflict of Interest Disclosure: Transparently report any potential conflicts of interest, including funding sources and affiliations, to maintain trust and credibility.
  • Active Feedback Loops: Establish clear mechanisms for seeking and integrating critical feedback from stakeholders, fostering continuous improvement and shared accountability.
  • Data Transparency and Accessibility: Share data and research findings in accessible formats, promoting open access to findings for community and academic use where appropriate.

Curiosity

Leading with open minds and hearts dissolves the divide between research-informed practice and practice-informed research. We see research and practice as interconnected, where questions from participants and practitioners shape our research, and insights from research inform and refine practice. Curiosity allows us to be inquisitive about ourselves, others and our work inspires us to be life-long learners.

Key Curiosity Practices

  • Foster Open Dialogue: Maintain transparent communication between participants, practitioners, and researchers to promote curiosity, shared understanding, and co-creation.
  • Create Space for Reflective Inquiry: Encourage thoughtful questioning without rushing to solutions, holding space for complexity and ambiguity. Embrace discomfort and “not knowing” by acknowledging privilege and centering power-sharing in the process.
  • Implement Structured Feedback Channels: Develop formal mechanisms for consistently gathering and integrating participant voices, ensuring their perspectives shape our work.

Reflection

In her book Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, bell hooks reminds us of the importance of reflection:

“Thinking is an action. For all aspiring intellectuals, thoughts are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together. The heartbeat of critical thinking is the longing to know—to understand how life works.”1

Our commitment to reflection in research and practice stems from this critical thinking framework. Reflection is a cornerstone of experiential learning pedagogy, representing an ongoing commitment to examining ourselves, our work, and our research. It is fundamental to being ethical and compassionate practitioners and researchers. Schön characterized reflective practice as the means by which professionals uncover their implicit knowledge (and biases), learning from their experiences.2 As a Collaborative, our goal is to engage in collective reflection on our work. This practice enables us to continuously refine our efforts and ensure alignment with our core values and ethical commitments.

Key Reflection Practices

  • Facilitate Deliberate Dialogue: Encourage thoughtful discussions during ORC meetings to promote reflection and collective growth among participants.
  • Designate Reflection Time: Set aside specific time in each meeting for reflection and debriefing using purposeful reflection questions to capture diverse perspectives and insights
  • Empathetic Reflection: Integrate and connect our discussions to participants’ lived experiences, fostering a deeper understanding of their realities.
  • Embrace Diverse Knowledge Sources: Gather information from various sources, valuing all voices and knowledge bases, regardless of whether they fit traditional empirical or scientific standards.
  • Practice Reflective Judgment3: Utilize three categories of reflective judgment to draw knowledge from multiple sources while maintaining humility and openness.
  • Establish Reflection Intervals: Beyond regular meeting reflections, identify specific time intervals to assess our collaborative progress and the effectiveness of our processes.

1 Hooks, B. (2010). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. Routledge.

2 Schon, D. A. (2008). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic books.

3 King, P.M. & Kitchener, K.S. (1994). Developing Reflective Judgment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, pp. 14-16.

Ethics

Ethical dilemmas are common in practice and research settings and require a commitment to participant well-being and safety. As an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and researchers, we are guided by our own professional ethics in our work (Social Work, Education, Psychology, Counseling, Recreation Therapy, etc.). In addition, we understand the additional ethical responsibilities we have in research including supporting transparency, informed consent, ensuring benefits outweigh risks, utilizing methods that properly match research goals, and ongoing respect for participants’ choice and voice in the research process. We are also committed to centering equity and asking hard questions about how power is shared in the process of ethical decision-making.

Key Ethical Practices

  • Conduct Peer Review and IRB Approval: Ensure all research studies undergo thorough peer review and receive Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to uphold ethical standards.
  • Implement Comprehensive Training Programs: Provide training for organizations on best practices for engaging participants in the research process, ensuring informed consent and choice.
  • Document CITI Training and Enhance Education: Maintain documentation of CITI research training while pursuing additional training opportunities to deepen ethical understanding and application in research and practice.
  • Create a Participant Bill of Rights: Develop and disseminate a clear bill of rights for participants and research participants, outlining their entitlements and protections.
  • Support Accreditation and Certification: Advocate for accreditation and certification processes that enhance and uphold ethical standards across all programs and research initiatives.
  • Mandatory Reporting Requirements: Support mandatory reporting obligations  to ensure compliance and protect vulnerable populations.
  • Engage in Ongoing Dialogue About Informed Consent: Foster continuous discussions around informed consent, participants' freedom to leave therapy, and the spectrum of choice, tailored to meet individual participant needs.
  • Advocate for H.R. 2955: Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act: Actively support legislation aimed at preventing institutional child abuse.

Voice/Choice

The members of the Collaborative are committed to amplifying participant voice and choice in both research and practice, ensuring that outdoor interventions are genuinely trauma-informed. We recognize that mental health and educational practices, even those occurring outdoors, have often been hierarchical and coercive in the name of participant safety. We believe that participants should be active agents in shaping interventions and determining their level of involvement whenever possible. Recognizing that outdoor interventions may not be suitable for everyone, we emphasize the importance of focusing on contraindications, the goodness of fit, and participant preferences and satisfaction in our research. We also believe that the lens of individual voice and choice must extend to the communities we serve. By actively listening to and learning from underrepresented groups, we can develop culturally relevant interventions that are rooted in the lived experiences and needs of participants. This commitment enriches our practice and fosters more effective, responsive outdoor interventions.

Key Voice and Choice Practices

  • Amplify Diverse Voices: Actively highlight and promote the perspectives of direct participants, diverse leaders, and intersectional populations to ensure that many different voices inform our work.
  • Enhance Informed Consent Practices: Collaborate with programs to strengthen processes around informed consent, prioritizing client voice and choice in all aspects of engagement.
  • Engage with Underrepresented Communities: Foster meaningful connections with underrepresented communities, ensuring their voices are heard and integrated into our practices and interventions.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

We operate from a core philosophy that diversity, equity, and inclusion is foundational to effective and ethical practice. To foster a sense of belonging among stakeholders, practitioners, researchers, and participants, we share our power, own our privilege, foreground accessibility, and amplify marginalized voices. Together, we adopt collaborative, strength-based approaches to decolonize and re-build the models, practices, and research methods used in outdoor and health industries.

Key DEIB Practices

  • Inclusive Recruitment and Representation: Actively recruit researchers, practitioners, and participants from diverse backgrounds (ethnic, racial, gender, ability, socioeconomic, and geographic).
  • Culturally Responsive Practices: Integrate culturally aware and relevant approaches in research design and outdoor programming.
  • Community Partnerships: Build relationships with BIPOC and underrepresented communities to co-create research initiatives and outdoor programs that reflect their specific needs and aspirations.
  • Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration that encourages diverse perspectives in outdoor research, health, and engagement fields, promoting innovation and inclusive practices.

Social and Environmental Justice

SEJ is at the core of a human rights framework. The inequities and injustices in our world have a ripple effect on individuals, families, groups, and communities. We cannot practice and research interventions in a vacuum. Rather, we must realize that the personal is political and the political is personal. We work together to advocate for socially and environmentally just policies and practices through anti-oppressive frameworks in both practice and research.

Key Social and Environmental Justice Practices

  • Inclusive Access to Outdoor Spaces: Work for accessibility in outdoor experiences are accessible to individuals from underrepresented groups, including people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, economically disadvantaged populations, and those with disabilities.
  • Participatory Research Methods: Use participatory action research (PAR) methods to include the voices of participants and communities in shaping the research agenda. This fosters empowerment and ownership over the process, ensuring that research outcomes are relevant and beneficial to the communities involved.
  • Decolonize Outdoor Practices:  Seek to integrate land acknowledgments thoughtfully into research and practice, and cultivate collaborative partnerships with Indigenous communities to co-create programming and research initiatives.
  • Empowerment and Leadership Development: Work to create pathways for leadership development among underrepresented groups in outdoor research and programming, offering mentorship for researchers and practitioners.
  • Support Grassroots Movements: Seek to partner with and support grassroots organizations working toward social and environmental justice, amplifying their work within the context of outdoor research and practice.
  • Sustainable Practices and Climate Justice: Engage in research that addresses climate change, and highlight the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations.
  • Advocacy and Policy Engagement: Engage in advocacy efforts to support policies that promote environmental justice and equitable access to outdoor spaces. Collaborate with other organizations and networks to push for systemic changes that address the root causes of social and environmental injustices.

Compassion

Members of the Collaborative are united by a deep, shared compassion for our world. At the core of our outdoor health practices and research lies a commitment to advancing the well-being of both society and the planet. This guiding principle is not only aspirational but also serves as our True North, shaping our actions, decisions, and partnerships. We believe that compassion is an active force—one that drives us to confront systemic inequities, heal the disconnection between people and nature, and work toward sustainable solutions for the challenges we face.

Key Compassion Practices

  • Foster Inclusive Spaces: Compassion starts with creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all members of the Collaborative, including diverse backgrounds and experiences. This involves active listening, validating each individual’s perspectives, and cultivating an atmosphere of non-judgmental support.
  • Incorporate Mindfulness and Self-Compassion: Create opportunities to practice mindfulness, breathwork, and other self-compassion strategies during ORC meetings to foster resilience and an embodied approach to discussing research and practice.
  • Trauma-Informed Approach: Enhance trauma-informed care principles in outdoor practice and research, ensuring psychological and emotional safety for participants, practitioners, researchers, and other key stakeholders.