Partner Spotlight: Vive Northwest
Guest post from Vive Northwest. To connect with us, please email our team at info@vivenw.org or call us at (503) 516-6668
Vive Northwest was founded with the core mission to diversify outdoor participation through empowering, educating, and inspiring BIPOC and Latinx community members to embrace healthier and active lifestyles. Throughout the years, we have achieved this goal through our health, stewardship, and recreation programming. All our programming strives to have four crucial elements: community, stewardship, health, and fun. We recognize that building our connection to the natural environment happens best when layered within cultural understanding and adventure. Also, a greater sense of stewardship towards the land can often emerge from having incredible experiences in natural spaces. Our founding mission continues to come to fruition by bringing hundreds of Latinx and BIPOC community members to monthly outdoor recreation and stewardship opportunities.
Vive NW also delivers a host of stewardship opportunities, from tree planting to beach clean-ups and everything in between. Our various ecological restoration events are often with engaged community partners, who add new layers and deliver different perspectives to our programming. We also engage with environmental issues by covering local, national, and global environmental news in our newsletter. We aim to provide the communities we serve with hands-on experiences and accessible information to build a greater connection with the natural world.
We strongly believe that spending time outside has immense mental and physical health benefits. The connection between health and nature is multifaceted, from the physical benefits of exercising to the various mental health benefits resulting from nature’s calming effect on the mind. Also, engaging in activities outside often allows people to open up and build deeper connections in their community. We engage in various programs across the health sector from videos on wildfire smoke and heatwaves to language interpreting for health agencies. We have numerous partners from local, county, and state government agencies with whom we work to deliver a wide range of PSAs in various mediums like videos, flyers, and radio spots. Below you will find some links to past videos we have created for some of the agencies we work with to help our community protect their health, the environment and engage in recreational opportunities.
Our team works hard to minimize (and remove) the barriers that inhibit the Latinx and BIPOC communities from accessing the outdoors, harnessing stewardship opportunities, and obtaining information to protect their health. We will continue working to continuously innovate our programming to help better meet the needs of the communities we serve.
We are thrilled to begin our partnership with the Lower Columbia Nature Network. Our organizations share vast alignment in connecting communities to the natural world. LCNN has an incredible array of partners across their network who are at the cutting edge of conservation and community work. Partnerships serve as a fertilizer for rapid growth and innovation for our wide array of work; therefore, we are thrilled and thankful to join the network.
To connect with us, please email our team at info@vivenw.org or call us at (503) 516-6668.
