From Hike Clerb’s inception as an impromptu hike with friends in 2017, Founder and Executive Director Evelynn Escobar has been led by her intuition, passion for the outdoors, and relationship with nature. In eight years, Hike Clerb has grown from a 10-person Meetup to a 501(C)(3) non-profit with over 45,000 members in Los Angeles and New York City.
On a beautiful sunny Saturday, I met up with Evelynn at Hike Clerb’s Earth Day hike in Malibu, California, to see firsthand how the Clerb has fostered such a close-knit, thriving outdoor community. As Evelynn gathered the hike attendees around a concrete picnic table, she announced that this would be her first and last hike of the season. Far along in her pregnancy with her second child, she joked about how long she’d be able to keep up with the group.
Keeping the group together is part of the Clerb’s “no one left behind policy.” We were to wait for anyone who fell behind the larger group and help round up stragglers at stops along the way, where we gathered to learn about the different plants and wildlife we saw on the trail. Before our Clerb hike got underway, Evelynn asked attendees to take a moment to practice gratitude for the land and set an intention for the day.
Before meeting Evelynn for the first time at the hike, I’d read her most recent newsletter in which she shared that she’d opted to have no contact with her mother. With her daughter growing inside her, Evelynn went through her own reparenting journey as she prepared to enter motherhood herself. She realized that she was never truly without a mother. It just wasn’t the one who’d birthed her. We shared a short but touching moment where I confided that I, too, was on my own reparenting journey. I let her know how her reflections had deeply resonated and inspired me.
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Tiffanie Woods: How has developing your relationship with the outdoors, with Mother Nature, helped in your reparenting journey of your younger self? How has it impacted you as a mother?
Evelyn Escobar: I think just essentially awakening to the fact that I have to do the reparenting work. Especially during my first pregnancy, knowing I was going to bring someone into this world, and then not having the traditional support of a mother. ### Then I had this big realization that I’ve always been supported by a mother. Not in the traditional way… and that mother has been nature. Mother Earth is always holding me, and she’s helping me move through this moment. I am being held. I am being nurtured, I am being carried, but it’s not by the mother who gave birth to me. It’s our primordial mother who holds all of us. That really transformed the way I found solace in nature. I then integrated that into not only re-parenting myself but also parenting my daughter.
Tiffanie: Did becoming a mom change the way you thought about your mission or Hike Clerb’s mission?
Evelynn: It just actually made it make more sense if that makes sense. It was like, ‘Oh, this is primed and aligned for this reason, and now those reasons are being shown to me.’ Also, this is like a matriarchal journey. It’s not just a mother’s journey, and that really cemented that.
Tiffanie: Sprouts is your initiative for children and families that you launched in 2024. Can you share the importance of this programming being incorporated into Hike Clerb?
Evelynn: Historically, we have had a mentorship program. Our Building Inclusivity Outdoors (BIO) program, in which we partner with organizations that serve under-resourced youth and bring them out into nature for the day. Take them hiking, give them shoes, get lunch with them, just spend a day out in nature.
Sprouts is a way to create a public-facing program in which kids, ages 2 – 10, in our community and their families could be a part of Hike Clerb. We created programming tailored to them that connects the outdoors with culture and the arts. We want them to experience and connect with nature in a new way.
**Tiffanie: **How do you see that initiative tying into your mission of decolonizing the outdoors?
Evelynn: It aligns with our mission to welcome people into the outdoors in a way that also decolonizes the way they think about the outdoors. We’re teaching them that they are inherently connected to nature, and we’re allowing them to explore their curiosities through different modules that speak to their interests and allow them to find their entry point. It’s setting them up with the ability to be the drivers of their own narratives, versus being filled with ideas of what it is to be outdoors and what those people who go hiking or exploring in nature look like.
Tiffanie: Hike Clerb’s focus is on Black and Brown women decolonizing the outdoors. I saw that you guys lost a grant for Sprouts due to the current anti-DEI movement being pushed by Trump. How are you thinking about Hike Clerb now and in the future, and how are you going to move forward?
Evelynn: I think there’s always a silver lining… it’s given me a chance to take a step back and really assess how we’re currently operating and what is feasible moving forward. And the truth of the matter is that we haven’t been operating sustainably, in the sense that we are making sure that we’re providing care for everyone, but at our own expense. We’re providing so much and making the impossible possible with the bare minimum when it comes to resources. When you think about the way Black mothers give so much… that is sadly normalized and becomes the standard, and it’s given me the chance to say enough of that! Moving forward, we are operating in a way that works for us. We’re taking our time and giving ourselves space to assess what we can accomplish with what we have, that is not coming at our own sacrifice or expense.
Tiffanie: Has your vision for Sprouts changed? Is it a different iteration given that it lost funding?
Evelynn: No, the vision is still the same. We are going to continue to engage families from this intergenerational approach. The first year, we did six programs. It culminated with a beach campout, and I feel like it was just a beautiful example of the power of what we’re doing. Especially seeing how empowered all the families were out there. The vision is to take this from LA, bring it to New York, bring it to the Bay Area, and continue to engage more families in this way. This is something we can bring to schools. We are rolling with the punches, but the mission remains. We will continue to serve families and connect with families, and open the minds of families in new ways.
Tiffanie: Hike Clerb has been around since 2017. How do you feel the outdoor community has changed since?
Evelynn: Well, the beautiful thing is that Hike Clerb was a cultural shift in the outdoors because it connected so much more than just the outdoors. When I think about my work, I know that I am an expander. I live in the visionary space, and it’s to expand people’s perspectives. And once you connect the dots, then people’s imaginations can run wild. Hike Clerb connects so many different worlds.
Tiffanie: Where do you still see change needed in the outdoor community?
Evelynn: Everything is political. It’s not enough to go out in your cute outfit and have a beautiful campout.
If the land is something you love, then you also need to go deeper and take care of that land, and protect that land, and learn about that land, and have reverence and respect not only for it, but for every other living and non-living thing.
That disconnection is still something that we see. It’s why we’re in the state that we’re currently in. It’s really hard for people to connect because we’ve been disconnected by design.
There is still a lot of work to be done. I am grateful for people like Brittany Leavitt of Brown Girls Climb, Feminist Bird Club, and Molly Adams, who leads that. They are also doing the work to connect and be like, ‘We may be birders, we may be climbers, but also… free Palestine!’ And you know, we can help with initiatives or just even talk about things like immigration and things like that. There’s hope. There are people who do get it, but it’s definitely still a work in progress.
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Tiffanie: Do you feel like, because you decided to take these stances of decolonizing the outdoors and making Black and Brown women your focal point, that you’ve felt resistance to you and your work?
Evelynn: Absolutely. All the time. Even when it comes to working with brands and other organizations. Because we have a very specific point of view and we are not afraid to use our voice, because we have this platform and it’s meant to be used, I go into these conversations, and if we’re doing a brand activation or whatever, I’m very clear about our mission and that it centers Black and Brown people. So the people that we’re going to be working for or creating this for are going to be Black and Brown people. We’re going to have to invite Black and Brown people. And I see the discomfort. I see that I’m also stretching people’s comfort zones.
Tiffanie: As a Black Indigenous Latinx woman, the creator and Executive Director, you’re doing it all. It’s almost as if you never get a break from pushing the work forward. How are you taking care of yourself, especially as a mom?
Evelynn: ### I am not willing to continue to sacrifice myself. Because at the end of the day, we talk about self-care, we talk about community care, but you have to take care of yourself to take care of the community. And I have been juggling that fine line of focusing on community care, but again, at the expense of my own self-care. And like I said, that’s just not something I’m willing to sacrifice anymore. The work I’m doing is expansive work. Visionary work. And if we don’t have the resources to support said vision, I’m not going to kill myself over executing it.
This is a new phase of truly caring for ourselves first, and again, creating the worlds we want to live in. I want to live in a world where I can rest and have time for myself. Be present as a mother, while also being the mother of this community.
