Header photo from our Colorado Providers of Equitable Access & Knowledge (PEAK) Strategic Planning Retreat held in July
This month, Rising Routes joined the Colorado Outdoor Strategy Leadership Committee as one of twenty organizations to help guide how Colorado’s Outdoors Strategy is implemented. The Strategy is the state’s new 10-year framework for aligning conservation, outdoor recreation, and climate resilience across Colorado.
The committee’s job is to strengthen coordination across partners, support priority actions, inform future goals and metrics, and help shape the Strategy’s long-term roadmap. Rising Routes joined so that the providers closest to underserved communities have a seat where those decisions get made. We will carry that voice from the Colorado PEAK Collaborative (Providers of Equitable Access & Knowledge), a statewide network of organizations working to ensure outdoor equity is a foundation of Colorado’s planning systems rather than an afterthought.
“A seat at this table only matters if it carries the trust of the providers behind it. Our job is to make sure the field speaks for itself in the rooms where Colorado’s outdoor future gets decided.” — Jason Swann, Executive Director of Rising Routes
About Colorado’s Outdoors Strategy
The strategy is a statewide framework designed to align the many separate efforts already underway across conservation, outdoor recreation, climate resilience, agriculture, and community well-being.
It was developed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office, and the Governor’s Office, in partnership with Tribal nations, local coalitions, nonprofits, and hundreds of Coloradans who weighed in on the draft.
The goals are:
- Climate-resilient conservation and restoration
- Exceptional and sustainable outdoor recreation
- Coordinated planning and funding
Each goal has specific objectives and connects to shared data, mapping tools, and partner commitments. While the strategy organizes around three connected goals, equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are named as a cross-cutting commitment across all goals. EDI should be a lens that shapes how every priority is implemented; this is exactly why Rising Routes wanted to be at this table.
Built to run for a decade and adapt over time, Colorado’s Outdoors Strategy functions as infrastructure for coordination.
Why coordination matters now
Colorado’s outdoors are under real pressure, and the Strategy outlines the top challenges: a growing population, rising recreation demand, climate change, drought, and wildfire.
From the Western Slope to the Eastern Plains, communities describe standing at a crossroads. They are working to connect people to the outdoors, protect biodiversity and functioning ecosystems, keep agricultural lands in production, sustain outdoor recreation economies, honor Tribal and Indigenous connections to land and water, and hold onto community character, often all at once and with limited resources.
No single organization can carry all of that, and no single agency can either. The premise behind the Strategy is that these challenges are connected, so the response has to be connected too. One of the pressures it names, inequitable access, sits at the center of our work.
Coordinated statewide planning creates a rare opening to address it, and that opening does not stay open forever. The committee is forming now. The charter is being drafted now. The metrics that will guide a decade of outdoor investment are being set now. This is the moment to put equity at the center, not add it later, but only if the organizations closest to underserved communities help shape the plan rather than absorb its outcomes after the fact. That is the precise gap the Colorado PEAK Collaborative was designed to fill: a statewide infrastructure that translates the experiences of community-based providers into the policy and funding systems that the Strategy depends on.
What the committee seat is for
As an equity-centered backbone organization, Rising Routes will bring a statewide, systems-level view to the committee. We are bringing two things into the room that this committee needs.
The first is evidence. Last year, Rising Routes assessed 81 outdoor education and recreation providers across Colorado and published a Roadmap for Colorado’s Outdoor Access Ecosystem. The report surfaced patterns no single organization could see on its own: funding instability concentrated in certain regions, leadership training gaps highest among the organizations least able to close them, and a persistent mismatch between where programs run and where communities need them. That gives the Leadership Committee something concrete to set priorities and metrics against.
The second is the Colorado PEAK Collaborative. This Collaborative is a statewide group of outdoor equity leaders, established this summer around a shared definition of equity that reaches past physical access to include knowledge, choice, belonging, opportunity, and shared power. When the committee sets targets and metrics later this year, those definitions need to be in the room. Otherwise we end up measuring the wrong things for a decade.
Here is the working definition that the Colorado Peak Collaborative is developing and will continue to be shaped and molded by community:
Outdoor equity exists when barriers are actively removed and everyone has the knowledge, choice, opportunity, and shared power to experience and shape the benefits of nature in ways that reflect their own cultures, values, interests, and needs, creating belonging and a shared responsibility for these spaces.
A statewide strategy and a statewide provider network are two halves of the same idea. The Strategy sets direction across the whole landscape, while the Colorado PEAK Collaborative keeps that direction accountable to the organizations doing the work on the ground.
Get involved
The Colorado PEAK Collaborative is currently being built. The Leadership Committee’s charter is being finalized soon. Technical subcommittees are being formed. If you represent an organization serving historically underserved communities and want your voice in Colorado’s outdoor future, the time to join is now, not after the structure is set. Join our provider network or email us at info@risingroutes.org.