Logo with text reading 'Accelerating a Movement for Youth Outdoor Access & Learning' in brown and blue fonts.
Logo with text reading 'Accelerating a Movement for Youth Outdoor Access & Learning' in brown and blue fonts.

Our Mission

ROOT Hub works to establish movement infrastructure to accelerate and expand movement-wide federal advocacy to secure the benefits of environmental learning and equitable access to the outdoors as a human right for all young people — especially for youth and children of color.

ROOT Hub strengthens the field* through coordinated action and alignment at the national level. By fostering connectivity, coordination, field engagement, and shared advocacy, ROOT Hub seeks to strengthen infrastructure and build on existing efforts to advance federal-level advocacy and strengthen and grow the movement across the field.

A group of four women outdoors, focused on weaving or crafting with natural material, surrounded by green foliage.

  • The field includes organizations and leaders working on outdoor access and environmental learning, who represent grassroots, grasstops, and research entities at the national, state, and local levels across multiple U.S. geographies.

Strategy Lanes

Venn diagram illustrating RootHub's strategic lanes for federal systems navigation and funding access, collective power building and field coordination, community-directed narrative change, and policy advancement and systems transformation.
Venn diagram illustrating RootHub's strategic lanes for federal systems navigation and funding access, collective power building and field coordination, community-directed narrative change, and policy advancement and systems transformation.

ROOT Hub operates across integrated strategy lanes to help accelerate youth’s access to outdoor exploration and learning - especially for youth and children of color.

Core Principles

Collective movement goals take precedence over individual organizational interests

Community priorities inform and guide field action — grounding strategies in community and field wisdom

Aligning and amplifying existing efforts disrupts a culture of duplication or competition

Centering young people and communities of color in all strategies and decision-making

Ceding power to communities, not consolidating it institutionally

Illustration of a small cityscape with various colorful buildings, trees, and people in a cartoon style.
Illustration of a small cityscape with various colorful buildings, trees, and people in a cartoon style.

  • ROOT Hub fosters field movement and cohesion through coordinated and aligned efforts. It offers a collaborative systems change approach to help the field access new sources of funding. While not a regranting project or organization, ROOT Hub seeks to build long-term, sustainable advocacy efforts aligned with its priorities by compensating organizations and leaders to enter or continue movement-building work (e.g., participating in convenings, coordinating advocacy efforts, or engaging in federal strategy creation and implementation).

    Movement leaders across the field have long sought support that connects them to one another, to federal and local funding, and strengthens their federal advocacy for local success. This initiative’s field research showed movement leaders believe that shared advocacy and movement building are critical to advancing federal efforts for equitable outdoor access and environmental learning for young people – and that the infrastructure needed to build a movement-wide initiative didn’t yet exist. ROOT Hub was born, grounded in those collective and agreed-upon needs. As ROOT Hub moves forward in actualizing its strategies and establishing its permanent governance, it remains committed to engaging and informing its evolution with movement leaders' voices.

Group of four women standing on a wooden boardwalk surrounded by tall green reeds, near a pond or marsh, smiling and taking a selfie.
A young girl with curly dark hair standing near a playground structure, smiling and looking to her left.
Group of five people walking outdoors on a sunny day near a tree and a grassy area, carrying water bottles and backpacks.
Children and a woman walking on a paved trail through a lush green forest in daytime.

Get Involved!

It's going to take continuous field-wide collaboration to ensure ROOT Hub accelerates a movement for youth outdoor access and learning.

Sign up for updates and learn how to become a part of ROOT Hub.

Get involved!
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