Jessica Carrillo Alatorre
Executive Director, Hike It Baby
The Basics
Company Name: Hike It Baby
Location: Based in Portland, OR with 350+ branches across North America
Founded: 2013 as an LLC, 2016 as a 501c3 tax-exempt nonprofit
Full-Time Employees: 1 (7 part-time)
Products: Real life communities that host family-friendly hikes every day, everywhere, for everyone. Online content and downloadable resources to support families in their efforts to get outside with babies and young children.
Social: Website, Instagram, Facebook
Claim to Fame: Helping tens thousands of families with babies and young children connect to each other in the outdoors. Hike it Baby is the largest organization dedicated to getting families outside, hosting an average of 1,600 real-life hike events each month. Together, we’re raising a generation to love the outdoors.
The Culture
The best thing about working here is:
The passion and dedication of our staff, board, volunteer teams, and 400+ ambassadors who lead local communities.
When we’re not working, we’re:
Hiking - usually with a baby on our backs or a toddler exploring every rock and leaf along the way. Playing inside or outside, singing and reading, and being inspired by our kids to learn something new every day-- just like they do!
What we’re reading:
Books: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv; children’s books about nature; So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo); The Color of Law (Richard Rothstein); anything and everything by N.K. Jemisin; Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina); The Whole-Brain Child (Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson); There There by Tommy Orange; eagerly awaiting In Open Country by Rahawa Haile; Malcolm Gladwell; Blogs or online: KatyKatiKate, Mater Mea, Outside Online, Medium, Code Switch, Aha! Parenting, Nonprofit AF.
What we’re listening to:
Birds and trees whenever possible. Podcasts: favorites include Code Switch, Hidden Brain, Longest Shortest Time; Music: anything we can dance to; our kids favorites (Caspar Babypants, Music Together, Red Yarn), Jurassic Five, Pink Martini; NPR news or shows that are on in the car on the way from place to place.
If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:
“Balancing act: There are always toddlers in the background on our work calls, and it turns out fine!”
Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:
The natural world offers a place to provide mental, physical, and spiritual health benefits, a place to connect with others, a place to find beauty, awe, and inspiration, and as the original mother, nature fosters love. We believe every human should have access to the outdoors, should be able to identify the outdoors as a space for them to enjoy, and should want to care for, protect, and celebrate that space. Everyone should have access and ability to form a connection to nature from birth. If we don’t include everyone in the conversation, in representation, and in all opportunities to enjoy the outdoors, we are barring individuals from an essential right of existence on this earth. Historically-- and largely still today-- we believe the mainstream conception of "the outdoors" is fundamentally flawed in portraying only the ruggedly fit, white, usually male, adventurer with all the gear. From the indigenous peoples who lived on this continent long before white people arrived to the black people whose forced labor built our economy to the hikers and campers of today, women, people of color, queer people, and many others who don't fit "the poster image" have always been in relationship with the outdoors through work and pleasure. The outdoor industry and environmental organizations need to catch up with the reality of who is outside.
Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:
There’s a wider representation of what it means to be in the outdoors, who can participate, how they participate, and that all kinds of families, especially those with babies and young children are able to identify the outdoors as a place they belong and enjoy. Also, that we will have moved to the next level beyond talking about “racial inclusion” in the outdoors -- a current topic in a lot of our circles-- because BIPOC will be meaningful represented in leadership, decision-making, and participation in activities, industry, policy, environmental work, recreation and all the other arenas touching the outdoor world.