Stephanie Maez

Executive Director, The Outdoor Foundation

 
 

The Basics

Company Name: The Outdoor Foundation
Location: Fully remote. Registered in the State of Colorado
Founded: 2000
Full-Time Employees: 2
Products/Mission: OF is the philanthropic arm of the Outdoor Industry Association. OF does not make or sell products.
Social: Instagram // LinkedIn // Twitter
Claim to Fame: The Outdoor Foundation is funding and convening the National Thrive Outside Initiative, aimed at strengthening community infrastructure to help nonprofits connect more youth and families from historically underrepresented areas with the outdoors.

 

The Culture

The best thing about working at The Outdoor Foundation is:

Working with our amazing Thrive Outside community partners and other key stakeholders.

When we’re not working, we’re:

Doing yoga, playing with our dog or cats, spending time outside, eating good food and enjoying our families.

What we’re reading:

o An Indigenous People's: History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz)

o Decolonizing Wealth (Edgar Villanueva)

o Parable of the Sower/Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)

o Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

o Collective Courage (Jessica Gordon Nembhard)

o My Grandmother's Hands (Resmaa Menakem)

o The Essential Rumi (Rumi)

What we’re listening to:

  • Podcast:

    • On Being with Krista Tippett

    • Upstream

    • Throughline

    • Citations Needed

    • Movement Memos

  • Music:

    • Stevie Wonder- Talking Book

    • Khruangbin, Leon Bridges - Texas Sun

    • Nick Hakim- COMETA

    • Jungle- GOOD TIMES/Problemz

    • Mndsgn- Rare Pleasures

If they made a movie about our workplace, it would be called:

Thriving Together: Collective Inner and Social Transformation in Nature

Inclusion in the outdoors matters because:

This planet doesn’t belong to us; we belong to this planet. And it is a human right for everyone to have access to the transformative benefits of spending time outside.

Five years down the line, it’s our hope that:

We will have learned more about the efficacy of Thrive Outside’s collective impact approach to funding networks of organizations in communities. We will have implemented these learnings to realize a more informed, inclusive and community driven approach to philanthropy at the Outdoor Foundation. We will have funded 18 Thrive Outside communities and have increased outdoor participation particularly youth and families in historically marginalized communities.