Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Outdoor Afro. Through Outdoor Afro, Mapp shares opportunities to build a broader community and leadership in nature. Her work promote the importance of diversity in the outdoors.
October 1971
Born and raised in Oakland, California.
Now lives in Vallejo, California
African- American
2009: Founded Outdoor Afro
2014: Received National Conservation Achievement Award for Communications from the National Wildlife Federation.
2015: Received Jefferson Award.
2019: Received 24th Heinz Award for the Environment.
Her family spent every other weekend on their ranch north of Oakland, California, where Rue grew up. She connected with nature, grew her own vegetables, and took care of the animals. She loved spending time outdoors.
As she grew up, she spent time in the Girl Scouts and attended a mountaineering programme.
She worked in finance for years, but after realising that African American people did not participate in nature as much as the remaining population of the United States, she set up a blog from her home, calling it Outdoor Afro.
She did daily blog posts with suggestions for how people could enjoy nature, and then began telling her own story about her love of nature and the struggles African Americans would have faced when wanting to spend time in nature.
She began to organise public events and turned her blog into a nonprofit organisation. Through the nonprofit organisation she was able to apply for grants and sponsorships to allow it to be her paid job.
Outdoor Afro now has 70 leaders in 28 states who are making careers of being outdoors and helping others to maintain environmentally friendly lifestyles.
She had children of her own and spent time with them outdoors where she noticed that there were not many African American people who did the same. She realised that it was because the outdoors was historically a dangerous and inaccessible place to African Americans
Talk to family members and friends about their connections with nature. Be a leader in your home, be a leader in your friend group and help people close to you find or reconnect with nature. Anybody can be a leader in nature.
Rue Mapp Bio | Nat Geo Live Resilience Executive Speaker Series (nationalgeographic.com)
Rao, A., 2020. One Earth: people of color protecting our planet. Canada: Orca Book Publishers. pp24-29.
(329) Jefferson Award Winner: Rue Mapp – YouTube
