Jessica Huneycutt told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

After sitting in the Saints lobby for four days, I think this receptionist just really took pity on me. She sent this coach an email. He comes out and we talk for two hours, and he’s like, “Thanks for the info. Love your enthusiasm, but there’s no precedent for yoga in the NFL. Stay in touch.”

I live in New Orleans, Louisiana. I grew up as a competitive swimmer, a junior Olympian. And it was kind of like, What is yoga? Is that like a religion? I don’t get it. Now I have been practicing yoga for about 15 years, and teaching for about 11 or 12 years.

Yoga helped me to be at peace within my body and find more stillness, to combat that anxiety and the PTSD that I had felt for a long, long time after being sexually assaulted as a teenager.

There are times where life challenges us to take a step back and look maybe with a more macrocosmic lens.

It was 2016, probably one of the lowest points of my life. At the time, I was going through a divorce and I was teaching dozens of classes a week at different peoples’ studios and barely making ends meet. I knew that it was gonna be tough. At the same time, my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, and she was given two years to live.

It was just devastating. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to live, I wasn’t sure how I could live.

One of my very early teachers was hosting a yoga retreat in Belize, and I had already done two separate, 200-hour yoga trainings. Really at that time, I was teaching, but I still didn’t consider myself a teacher. I just wanted to really learn.

On that retreat in Belize, we spent a week waking up with the sun, and going down to the water and practicing yoga twice a day, just really absorbing the natural beauty. I was so full of energy and life from the setting and the people and the situation. The training was so lovely.

I decided to stay in Belize for an additional week. It was just me and my backpack and a couple bucks in my pocket.

I met a couple who turned out to be these scientists from the UK who were in the jungle in Belize studying spiders. We got to talking and they invited me to come to their outpost in the middle of the jungle. And I said yes.

At 7:00 AM, I waited by the side of the dirt road by a stop sign. They picked me up in their truck, with me just running on blind faith. It was a lot of heaviness in my heart, and I kind of felt like, What do you have to lose?

We drove for a long time down a one-lane dirt road and then this guy looks to his wife and he just says, “I’ll get the boat.” And I’m like, “Oh gosh.”

So he comes back a few minutes later with this little, tiny motor boat, and the three of us get in.

When I say remote…it was so isolated. I couldn’t even tell how this guy was navigating the waters. There were no landmarks, no signposts whatsoever. We saw a few crocodiles, a few monkeys, and that was it.

He ties up the boat, and then he digs in the ground and uncovers a few machetes. And he hands one to me, and one to his wife, and he takes one himself. And he says, “Stay close, there are big cats in this jungle.”

We walk another 45 minutes, and we get to their little outpost, which has a water tank and solar power. Everything they need to survive. It was really there, in that remote part of nature, with two absolute strangers, that I really was able to sit. And just kind of think and be.

Life is short, and none of us know how long we have. I just knew that I had to do something to change my life in a way that it felt like I wanted to live it. I thought to myself, What do I want my life to look like?

My first thought in my heart is just, I have to be in New Orleans. New Orleans has always, since the moment I first set foot here, felt like home and has called me back. For my second thought, I got this wild idea that I was gonna be the yoga instructor for the New Orleans Saints football team.

Maybe it was a few days before or after that trip, but at the time, a friend of mine was running a school in inner-city Philadelphia. I started an afterschool yoga program there, and the first day, like a hundred 15-year-old young men showed up. And I thought, Surely, something is amiss. And I asked this kid right in front of me, “Did one of your teachers offer you extra credit?” And kid looked at me and he said, “No, ma’am, we play basketball and we heard LeBron does yoga.” That’s when it really dawned on me the incredible impact and power that somebody with a platform like that can have, because I want to help people heal in the ways that yoga has helped me heal or in any way that it can be beneficial.

When I came back from that trip, I researched the role of yoga in professional sports. I researched who the strength coach for the Saints was, and wrote a really hilarious-to-me-now report entitled “Yoga for Elite Athletes.” It was a bullet-pointed four-page list of the ways that it would prevent injury and save money, et cetera.

Then I just flew from Philadelphia down to New Orleans, and I gave myself a week.

I had my report printed out, and I would go and sit in the lobby and ask for this coach and the receptionist, the first day she’s like, “Well, is he expecting you?” And I’d say, “No, ma’am.” And she’d be like, “OK.” And I would sit down and I would just sit from nine to five.

This continued Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I want to say the fourth day this receptionist sent this coach an email. And he welcomes me back into his office and we talk for two hours and he’s like, “There’s no precedent for yoga in the NFL. Stay in touch.”

I was like, OK that’s it. I’m moving back to New Orleans. I’m gonna go down there and make it happen. Everybody was like, “Love you, Jess, but you’re crazy to move down to New Orleans. It’s not gonna happen.”

I had been down here for a month or two, and was starting to really sweat it. Then I ended up getting a text that just asked me if I could come back out to the training facility. I was so excited because I thought, Gosh I’ve got a second interview.

When I got out there, he said, “Thanks so much for coming back in. There are 90 guys on the indoor football field, you have 15 minutes to warm them up. Good luck.”

I walked out on the football field and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. “All right, everybody, lift your arms up by your ears. Bend your knees. Sit back into a chair.” And while they were sitting in a chair, I just said, “My name is Jess. I was a junior Olympic swimmer. I’m trained in Russian kettlebells and pilates and yoga and martial arts. I’m here to stretch you guys out and keep you injury free. Fold forward, touch your toes.” I was sweating, screaming, shaking. And then afterwards, I shook the coach’s hand. I said, “Thank you so much for the opportunity.”

He just said, “You’re hired. We’ll see you Monday.”

This will be my eighth season coming up this year.

I have taken vows as a Buddhist. And a lot of these athletes, my students, who I consider my teachers, are very devout Christian. I might speak a very different language, but it’s all love.

Something I say to them is, “OK, great. Demario Davis, you’re a very Christian man, right? You’re a man of God. Yes?” “Yes.” And I say, “Great. Well you know prayer is when you talk to God. Meditation is when you listen.”

The best and hardest lessons that I’ve ever learned throughout a lot of hardship in my life is to be still and to be quiet. Because, as one of my teachers said to me very early on, you already have everything you need inside of you. And you’re gonna need it all.

Jessica Honeycutt is a lifelong athlete and lover of movement, the arts, the great outdoors and other people, most of all, her son. She has been Team Yoga Instructor for the New Orleans Saints since 2016.

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Drew Hulsey told his story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

There’s always a bit of embarrassment when it’s a bigger person doing a typical smaller person sport. Kind of like, why am I even here? Why would I even attempt to do this?

My real job is that I’m a social worker case manager. I didn’t have many outdoor hobbies before. I went fishing a good bit. But I never really saw myself doing “extreme sports.”

I saw the movie Free Solo in early 2019. It was about Alex Honnold, who free solo-d El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. So he climbed about a 3000-foot route without ropes.

It was just something I wanted to go see, and I talked my wife into going to see it as well. I just knew it was gonna be a pretty documentary because it was a Nat Geo film. But I didn’t really know much about climbing.

Watching that movie, I was super interested in how climbers live their lives, as far as living in vans and chasing rocks.

I felt like I wanted to be in that situation where I was on a side of a cliff, and I was looking around me, and just that thrill and that adventure and that moment of, My body took me here. And I had not really had that much beforehand.

Immediately I looked over to my wife, I think as the credits were rolling. I was like, “I want to try that.” I didn’t want to try free soloing. I just wanted to try climbing. So I went home and I Googled, “Can fat people climb?”

I did not find much information or anything. So I made it a point to go to a gym and just ask those questions. Can the ropes hold me? Can bigger guys get on climbing routes and the gym? Will there be a safety issue with it?

And the first gym I went to, they were like, “No, you’re good. The ropes hold thousands of pounds.” And they had harnesses big enough for me, too. That was like, “Oh, I can do this within my means. I can do this.”

I came back a week or two later. Me and my wife bought a Groupon to go to get like three visits and gear. We had our Valentine’s Day date.

I think at the time when I started, I was 310, maybe. I was still pretty nervous. It seems silly for me to wanna go after this goal, but I think at most their walls went 20 to 30 feet, which is good to learn ropes on. I made it to the top of the wall, so that was encouraging enough to keep me going.

The goal the whole time was to be comfortable enough to go climb outside. So we both learned together. We took a trip with my gym and we read some books that helped us out, learned anchor systems and that kind of thing.

I’d say the climbing community is pretty welcoming. You gotta work on your self-esteem. Climbing is a sport where you’re gonna be surrounded by probably the most fit people you’ve ever seen. I’ve had panic attacks at the gym. It would come when I would start comparing myself. I would think that I should be accomplishing it, not falling, or, Oh, so-and-so’s climbing this route right now out in Yosemite and you can’t even climb this 5.6 in a gym. And that’s not healthy for anybody. So in those moments, I’ve just left the gym and talked to my therapist about it.

There’s better ways to talk to yourself than hateful comments. That was me not giving myself space to love myself and be happy for what I was accomplishing.

It became less about trying to climb harder and more about just the fun of it. The goal was never really to lose weight with it or anything, it was just to get my body moving.

A year after seeing that documentary, I got my own climbing van to live in on the weekends. We did a big road trip out there to go to see Yosemite, and that was awesome. I climbed my biggest route, at that point ever, on that trip.

It’s an amazing area for climbing, but it can be hard. But I did it. I always think of that moment of going up that wall and climbing 350 feet, and being surrounded by Half Dome, and El Cap’s just to my left. And climbing behind Camp Four, which is a big historical climbing area. It was an awesome moment because my wife, Sarah, got to meet me at the top, because there was a walk around. You could just hike to the top of the rock. So I got to climb all the way up there and then get to celebrate with her. All the stoke, big hugs and kisses and pictures, and it became a full circle moment, where everything lined up and I realized bigger things could happen.

When it’s not shown in outdoor media that bigger folks go and do these things, the general public probably has no idea that a 300-pound man can go climb a wall. It’s just not shown. So that’s why I posted it on the climbing Reddit, I think I posted my, “I got my 300-pound self up a wall,” and that became the third most-liked post in that climbing Reddit’s history. It was more than Alex Honnold soloing El Cap. It passed that.

So that’s why I started my Instagram. Where I was like, Oh, maybe people are interested in this. And it’s inspired a ton of folks out there to try climbing. It’s led to me having climbing clinics focused on body positivity, I get to do those at climbing events.

My focus then became doing cool stuff in the body that you got. Don’t let society or norms hold you back from doing those things you wanna pursue. You can just start now. Take it a little bit at a time to start, start small and work your way up. That’s the journey. That’s what it is really about. Because once you start moving, you really can’t stop. Especially if you find the right folks to do it with that are encouraging and that’ll keep you motivated.

Climbing is for everybody.

Drew Hulsey is a rock climber, social worker, and an outdoor enthusiast in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Find him on Instagram .

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Russel Palecek told his story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A couple of officers that worked for me were in the Reserves and got deployed and came back, and you could see a change in them and you could see the struggling some of them went through.

Once you meet a veteran that went through what these guys go through now with the conflicts they’ve been in, you know how lucky you were. I volunteered in 1975, and was planning on graduating and joining the service whether or not Vietnam was still there. I just got lucky that I joined after it was over. So I felt I should be able to give back.

I live in the Villages, Florida. It’s between Leesburg, Florida and Ocala, Florida. I am with Patriot Service Dogs. I am a board member and assistant trainer.

Before I retired, I worked for the New Jersey Department of Corrections as a corrections sergeant.

From 1975 to 1978, I was military police for the Army. During the Cold War, as most veterans say. During my service, it was more of a security capacity, escorting ammunition and missiles from bunkers to Air Force bases. So I feel uncomfortable if somebody tells me, “Thank you for your service,” because I might have joined, but I didn’t have to go through what the veterans I’ve met have. I feel that I should be able to give back to them because they have seen combat and I was lucky enough not to.

I had many dogs in my childhood. My first childhood dog was a golden retriever named Lady. I was one of four children, and I was always bringing a dog home that I would find as a stray somewhere. Even when I was in the service and I was stationed in Germany, I had a dog over there.

A dog will be your companion. Your best friend, without looking for something in return. So that’s what appeals to me about a dog. A dog is loyal to the person that they live with, and nothing can change that.

I moved from the Philadelphia area to the Villages in 2019, basically for retirement. Our last dog passed away probably about six months before. So I was looking for something where I could still travel and not have a dog at home, but that I could still have a dog in my life.

I started working with Patriot Service Dogs after meeting an individual that spoke to me about him volunteering with the organization. I reached out with an application online, and they responded to me and explained what the program was doing.

The mission of Patriot Service Dogs is to train dogs for disabled veterans. Our program provides a veteran with a much-needed service, but it also provides some way for the women inmates in Lowell Correctional Institute to do something also to help veterans, and also for themselves.

They’re actually the backbone of the training for the dogs. The women of Lowell Correctional do 90 percent of the work. The hard work I should say, especially when you have an eight-week-old puppy that needs to be potty trained and taught the basics.

My desire was to be a weekend raiser. Because the dogs can learn all the tricks, but they need to know how to do it in the world. You don’t have sliding doors like you have at grocery stores in prison. You don’t have cars riding by. You don’t have trash trucks riding by, you don’t have buses. So the dogs need to be exposed to all that.

They would drop off on a Friday, and you would have the dog and give it real world experiences, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then the director would drive them back to their inmate trainers.

Now some dogs are proficient in areas of retrieval where if you drop your keys, they’ll grab the keys and bring them to you. If you point to it and tell them, they’ll grab your phone and give it to you. They’ll grab the remote control. We teach the dog to retrieve canes if a person has a cane. They can brace if people need help steadying when they get up.

Lately there’s been a lot of PTSD dogs, and for some reason you can’t really teach a dog about PTSD, but their senses can tell, once they start bonding, that that person needs some calming or that person needs some attention.

And I’ve met veterans that had a dog for that specific reason. One of them had started getting Parkinson’s, and the dog, itself, would put his head in his legs when he felt the guy was shaking. And then he would call his wife over and say, “I need my meds.” Because the dog alerted them that he’s starting to shake. So, dogs are phenomenal at just having the instinct to adjust to their owners and what they need.

The first placement I did with the veteran training was with a black lab. He was probably seven months old. I had him numerous times, and got to do a lot of firsts, like going to the airport with him, going to malls, going around buses at the airport. He was going to a veteran that never had a dog before. So, I got to see what it’s like for somebody that really needs to be taught from the ground up on how to have a dog in his life.

Before he got the dog, he couldn’t do crowds, he couldn’t go out in public. It was a unique experience just to see him become more open as we did things. Even for him not being a dog person, you could see that dog was focused on him on day one. I had him for months. He was still focused on that veteran. So, it’s just amazing to see that happen. These dogs that make it through our program, they know who they’re working for once they get placed. It doesn’t take that long before a dog becomes a bonded pair with their veteran.

That veteran, the first veteran I helped with, he was amazed at everything the dog could do. It’s a comfort for them. They know that their buddy’s there, their buddy is next to them, and nothing’s gonna change that.

It doesn’t matter who you are, the tears flow at graduation. It’s hard to explain until you can actually speak to a veteran after he just gets his dog, after that week of training, and how he feels. It’s so rewarding.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been thanked. And you want to just say, “Stop saying ‘thank you.’ I’m thanking you because of what you did.”

I’m getting a benefit just as much as they are.

Russel Palecek is an Army veteran and retired corrections police sergeant. He works with dogs and his fellow veterans at Patriot Service Dogs, a winner of the 2022 Defender Service Award. Established by Land Rover, these awards recognize the nonprofits doing selfless service for their communities every day. You can learn more about this winner at .

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Stephanie Prellwitz told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I remember seeing things like a gas station lifted off its foundation and moved across the parking lot. I remember there was this dentist office where the entire building was gone. Everything, all the walls, the plumbing, but a single dentist chair was left bolted to the ground. It felt like an impossible task for these communities.

I live in Ripon, Wisconsin. I’m the CEO of a nonprofit organization called the Green Lake Association. I am an engineer. I’m a gardener. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. And I’m trying to keep it all in balance.

I was a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, and I was studying biomedical engineering. So I was working in labs dissecting mice, and Hurricane Katrina happened.

I took my fall break with a student group, and I headed down to Pass Christian, Mississippi, east of New Orleans. We were tasked with going there to help with the cleanup. And often we were working with the homeowners themselves to provide some relief, an extra set of hands to help them clean up the wreck.

The hurricane happened in August, so months had passed, and it was still in disarray. It looked like the day after it happened.

Obviously I wasn’t affected like the entire community was, but what I saw there I think forever changed me. What I saw is that Pass Christian, Mississippi was completely destroyed. It was leveled. Nothing was standing there. Rubble that filled entire city blocks was as high as buildings. Old photographs and heirlooms and history…it was all washed away.

It seemed out of balance, that nature was out of balance. The hot summer, it was this oppressive heat. We slept in a hollowed out church, so just the frame of the building existed, and a roof. We slept in our sleeping bags.

I remember pulling out moldy insulation, pulling out refrigerators that had been rotting in the sun. We had to duct tape them shut and make sure that the black oozing goo didn’t make its way out of the refrigerator onto your arms.

It felt impossible.

I think for me, the moments of hope were during mealtime. Putting on a lunch or a dinner for an entire community was no small feat. Still seeing that people found moments to laugh and to smile and to talk about their day. These were people who lost everything, but they still had hope.

And what was so inspiring was that working together and seeing the community working together made a difference. We didn’t solve all of the problems, but in this teeny town, in this single community, that we were able to work together to make a difference, felt like somehow restoring that natural balance.

So I came back to Lexington and I ditched biomedical engineering. I got out of the lab and I changed my major to biosystems and agricultural engineering. That for me really opened the door. I got to learn about these living, breathing systems, using engineering and biology to work with communities to solve environmental problems.

I worked for a few years at a consulting engineering firm, a civil engineering firm. I was sizing bridges, sizing culverts, and doing erosion control plans, but for me it was missing that people component. So I went back to grad school in the same major at Madison. I found myself living in Ripon, Wisconsin. I then took a job at the Green Lake Association.

Green Lake is in central Wisconsin, in the Lake Michigan watershed. So the water that flows from Green Lake makes its way northward and eventually drains in Green Bay to Lake Michigan. The mission of the Green Lake Association is to safeguard this amazing lake to improve its water quality and protect it from critical threats.

Last summer, right after the Fourth of July weekend, we started to hear some noise from really concerned neighbors about this non-metallic mine, which is really a quarry, that was going in their neighborhood. What was so alarming to us is that this non-metallic mine, that would be a 40-acre gravel pit, would be a single farm field away from these really incredible springs which are well known in the community, revered. These are magical spaces. They form the headwaters of our trout streams, and also this is the same groundwater that is flowing into people’s drinking water wells.

Literally just that year we had learned that brook trout were finally, naturally reproducing in Dakin Creek. They were last seen 70 years ago. The Green Lake Association worked on this project to bring brook trout back. And not only were they living and thriving, but they were naturally reproducing, which is such an important indicator of the water quality.

And so when this mine project came along, I think the whole community realized what was at stake.

We worked in the coming months, and we filed an appeal to the Board of Adjustment. We rallied the hell out of the community. All of that came together on December 23, two days before Christmas. There was a blizzard like I had never seen before, and I thought, We’re gonna lose the community voice here. But when I showed up at the courthouse, there was a line out the door, and as I weaved my way through the line and went through security, what I saw was there were probably a hundred people in the courthouse. There were hundreds of people who had joined online.

For hours during public comment, people came to the microphone. I remember hearing from a dairy farmer who lived across the street. He was worried about the quality of the water and the quantity of the water that he relied on to water his dairy cows. We heard stories from the Ho-Chunk tribe, who talked about the spiritual value of these properties, and how much it mattered to not have short-term gains permanently degrade these natural resources.

And so yes, we had the science and we had the data to show that this mine was gonna be a problem. But I think most importantly, I felt like the community carried us through. Their stories were so powerful that we were able to stop the mine.

When I think about what we were able to accomplish, it reminds me so much of what I saw in Hurricane Katrina. I think a lot of the work is about community trying to bring back balance to make these natural systems resilient. So that when the next challenge comes along they’re more able to cope with it.

Stephanie Prellwitz is the CEO of the Green Lake Association, a winner of the 2022 Defender Service Award. Established by Land Rover, these awards recognize the nonprofits doing selfless service for their communities every day. You can learn more about the Green Lake Association at .

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Kim Delozier told his story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

He kept getting closer and closer. By this time, I was walking backwards at a pretty steady pace, and the low tone voice was going to a screaming voice, hollering, “Bear, get back, bear! Get back!” And he continued to come.

Some people kind of turn their heads sideways when they hear my voice and hear the first name Kim. And I assure them I’m not a female, I was named after my grandfather.

I live in Seymour, Tennessee, probably 20 minutes from Dollywood, 30 minutes from Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So that’s kind of in my backyard. I’ve lived here basically my entire life on our family farm.

I had a big interest in becoming a vet. I recall my dad calling me one night and saying, “Hey son, I need your help. We have a cow that has a prolapsed uterus.” When they’re trying to calf they strain so hard that the uterus turns inside out.

It was in January. It was the middle of the night, and cold and wet and nasty and muddy. No big training session necessary. You just get behind a cow, start pushing. You push everything back in. I remember when I pulled my arm back out and I said, “There has got to be a better way to make a living than doing this.”

So the very next day, I went to school at the University of Tennessee, and I changed my career over to wildlife and fisheries science from animal science.

My first position was actually a wild boar hunter for the government at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. First of all, I really didn’t even realize they had that program, and was really surprised they would even pay someone to do it. And I kept thinking, Well, why are you trying to get rid of them or reduce the population? The guy that I talked to said, “Basically it’s because they’re exotic. The National Park really protects native species and we try to get rid of non-native species.”

They moved into the park in the late 1940s, early 1950s. The mountains are a tough place to make a living, so your native species like bear and deer and squirrels and things like that rely on one of the most important food sources, fall foods. The fall food is acorns from oak trees. When you bring a whole population of wild pigs or wild boar in, they eat a tremendous amount of food that would be for your native species.

I had not really done a lot of backpacking or camping, but that quickly changed. The job basically was carrying your backpack up five to ten miles in the backcountry, having a little camp there where you had some supplies, then you basically look for wild boar in the late afternoon, evening, and nighttime period.

On one of the trips, we hiked six miles or so up to our base camp, dropped everything off, then started walking the Appalachian Trail.

No sound of airplanes or cars or anything like that. The only thing you could hear was the wind blowing, rustling the trees and stuff too. Almost to the point where your ears would hurt if that makes any sense, because there’s very few times we’re in a situation where we hear no sound at all.

I realized too, this is something pretty special that I got to experience. It didn’t take me very long to understand or know that this was something that I planned to do, I wanted to do for a long time.

I was pretty naive. So every day was a classroom for me. It was a lesson to be learned, too.

One time, we were hunting by ourselves. And I remember It was very quiet and I could hear a few birds chirping. I’m listening, and all of a sudden, I saw a whitetail deer run across a trail. And I thought, Well, that’s pretty neat. I could see something coming through the vegetation. And then I could see the top of a black head coming through. It turned out to be a pretty large-sized black bear.

I thought to myself, I know how to handle animals, so I’ll have a little fun with him. So I did a deer alarm sound, which is a blowing sound that tells you that these deer are afraid and they’re running away. Well, I did that to the bear and that’s when he made a bee-line towards me.

And when he kept on coming, I kept talking to the bear in this low tone saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t really mean to do that. That’s close enough. Please don’t come any closer.”

We used 12-gauge shotguns in the park at that time to kill wild pigs, and so I had that with me. I said, I’m not gonna shoot a bear. He’s not gonna get very close.

Well, when he finally hit the trail, I think I remember looking for its teeth more than anything else, and looking at the size of its legs that to me looked like power poles. I guess I probably went into a semi-comatose condition where I didn’t know what I was looking at or what I was saying or what I was doing. I just wanted that bear to get away from me.

He kept on getting closer. My speech had elevated to where I was screaming, I was waving my arms, I was kicking the dirt, doing everything, trying to get this animal to stop. And he wasn’t stopping.

When he got about seven or eight feet from me, I took my 12-gauge shotgun, pointed up in the air, and pulled the trigger.

Of course, it made a pretty loud sound. At that time, the bear stopped and he looked at me like he was evaluating me. It didn’t scare him very much at all like I thought it would. He kind of bobbed his head a couple times, as if he was trying to sense my smell. And he slowly turned around and walked away.

My knees were knocking, and I was pretty upset. You could probably push me over with a feather at that time.

I gained a pretty big respect for what these animals can do, and that we obviously need to act a certain way in their territory, as well.

After working over 30 years with the National Park Service, and most of that time as a wildlife biologist, another big lesson I learned was that it’s really too dangerous to put a tranquilized bear in the back of a helicopter. But that’s another story.

Currently I work with Appalachian Bear Rescue, which rehabilitates orphaned and injured cubs and yearlings. Now I spend a lot of time educating other people what their responsibilities are when they visit or live in bear country.

Obviously, some people want to get as close as possible. They want to get a picture, they want to throw a cookie or a cracker or a donut or a piece of fried chicken to it, thinking they’re helping it, when in fact they’re actually killing it.

With bears, their wild behavior is something that’s really their survival instinct, and they need that to be able to make it. And when we allow them to get our food and garbage and become food conditioned or habituated to people it puts their life in jeopardy. They’re probably not gonna live near as long.

Let the bear be a bear.

Kim Delozier has spent over three decades working as a wildlife biologist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He wrote two books about his experiences, Bear in the Backseat one and two. He currently works with bears at Appalachian Bear Rescue, a winner of the 2022 Defender Service Award, established by Land Rover. These awards recognize the nonprofits doing selfless service for their communities every day. You can learn more about Kim’s work at appalachianbearrescue.com.

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Jonny Moses Soto-Altrogge told his story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Here in the city, I was working with students of color and all kinds of backgrounds, who were often experiencing being outdoors for like the first time. And often I would hear the students, whether it was climbing or backpacking, say, “This isn’t for us.” Like, “We Black people don’t climb, Black people, blah, blah, blah.”

I live in the heart of Brooklyn. If you know anything about Brooklyn, it’s very loud, so you might hear some noise in the background.

I have worked for Outward Bound for almost a decade now—I think I’m on year nine—leading all kinds of outdoor programming for young people all with the intention of building resilience, and teaching students about responsibility and communication and leadership.

I think there was a particular time during a five-night backpacking trip where we had a group of students from the city. There was this weird period of YouTube that there were clowns in the woods pranks that were happening. I remember students being like, “Yo, there’s no clowns out here in these woods, right?” And then another student was like, “That’s why we Black people don’t come to the woods. Like, we gonna get killed out here.” They were doing it humorously, but there was some actual fear embedded in that, you know?

The history of the fear that Black and brown folks feel and express about being in the woods or wilderness is as long as the history of this country is. First of all, Black and brown folks literally toiled the lands, created the foundation for our industries. But then there’s also this connotation of being slaves, being killed in the woods, being tracked in the woods, being lynched on trees. Of rural people, or the folks who have the shotguns, don’t want you here, don’t go near them.

At the end of the trip, one of the students who I really connected with a lot told me that for his career, he wanted to be a wilderness first responder. He wanted to go out and train to help save people in the wilderness. And this is a kid from Harlem.

That kind of keyed me in. How can we make that happen more often? How can we eliminate some of that fear? That fear is real. I felt that fear. But, how do we claim the space? Because they deserve it, too.

I was like, I want to do a big trip. I don’t know what that means or what that looks like yet, but I want to do a trip. At some point I identified that I wanted to bike the Continental Divide, so that young students of mine, or like mine, could see people like me doing this big outdoor trip and be like, “Oh, you know what? That’s kind of cool. And maybe these things are for me. Maybe Black people do do these things.”

Plus I just wanted to kind of kick my own ass for a while.

So the Great Divide mountain bike route originally stemmed from Banff to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, which is right on the border of Mexico in the United States. It runs 2,700 miles approximately. Something like 200,000 feet of elevation gain overall.

I started the ride on June 22nd, 2019. I think I was shooting for six weeks.

I remember those first few pedals, my body and inside was screaming like, Ahhhhhhh, we’re doing it! It’s going down, it’s legit.

The vastness of Banff. Banff feels like it’s fake. It’s so beautiful, it’s so massive. And so to be in this massive, incredible place, starting this massive, incredible ride. At one point on my bike, it was just a little too much. I just started to cry. Not out of fear or nervousness, just at the gravity and grandeur of it all. It just really sunk in. Then the reality of a big bike tour also sunk in, of the pain and the hunger and all those things.

As a Black mountain biker and bikepacker, I had some incredible experiences with other people. And there were experiences that made me feel unsafe.

There was a campground in Montana, that was a state campground. Although there was no one in the campground, there was a family who managed it. I rode up and was like, “Hey, I’m gonna camp here if that’s cool. It’s state ground.” They sent me on my way pretty quickly. Most Black and brown people know that kind of situation. When you’re not wanted in a spot, I’m not gonna push that agenda.

Or there is an experience in Idaho. Just super long, flat, trail through the woods, kind of like a dirt bike trail. I could see in the distance a handful of four-wheelers with shotguns. And the anticipation of that interaction lasted a long time because they were pretty far away.

So eventually I reached them. I just rolled past them and gave them a little wave, and they didn’t say a damn word. And I just kept biking. I turned down my camera, pointed it behind me so I could see if they decided to come after me, but they didn’t follow, thankfully. But the fear that I experienced was real.

I have the potential to go do this amazing trip in the outdoors. I don’t want the power of fear of the folks who might be there and who might wish me harm or who might not love my presence there. I don’t want to give them the power of that fear.

This is my space, this is your space, this is our space.

Because really people show up for you in so many different ways. This guy coming up past me in the opposite direction saw me, turned around, came back, and gave me his gloves. And I had gloves, but these were wool, workmen, outdoor gloves. He’s like, “Hey man, saw you’re cold,” and takes these gloves off of his own hands. That helped keep my hands warm enough to finish the thing I needed to finish, but then also warmed my soul. It was an incredible moment of human connection. That was a huge moment for me.

As I was doing the trip, I was posting about it intentionally to get folks to see it. So throughout the course, as the miles grew, the amount of people following my experience and trip grew as well.

My little documentary that I made about the trip, which is on YouTube. There were students who I would show the video, or pictures, or tell stories to, who had that kind of classic young person reaction of, “Oh man, that’s cool.” Sparking that kind of excitement or imagination for a young person…to me, that was the win.

It was like, Hell yeah. That’s why I did this.

Johnny Moses Soto Altru is a social and emotional coach for New York City Outward Bound schools, and a racial equity consultant for True North education. He’s also the captain of Team Onyx, the first all Black adventure racing team. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, their son, and their pets.

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Ryan Gaglianese-Woody told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Going into college, I was just working out, solely for my physical image and no other reason. It was literally the only thing that would be on my mind was when was I gonna work out, and what can I have to eat today.

My name’s Ryan Gaglianese-Woody. I use she/they pronouns, and I’m currently studying to be a force-free dog trainer in Asheville.

���ϳԹ��� of work, I am very much into mountain biking. I’ve been doing a lot of that with my dog, a wonderful 80-pound mutt named Moose. He wants to be involved in everything. So you might hear him outside making some sounds, maybe whining a little bit.

In high school, I was a pretty athletic person. I definitely defined my worth based off how well I could perform, running specifically, but also in any sort of physical activity.

I was in ROTC, and I wanted to just be the best and look the best. I remember I would look on Pinterest and see these sculpted abs, and I’d look at myself in the mirror and be like, Well, what do I need to do to get that? Essentially, I would work out twice a day and I had a food journal. I’m just not built that way. You’re chasing something that you’re never gonna catch.

Going from high school to college, I definitely had a lot of challenges meeting new people. So I think that that really escalated those self-image issues. I knew I wasn’t eating the way you should be eating with the number of miles that I was running. But at the time I was like, Well, that’s what I need to do, to reach whatever goals I had physically.

So I ended up with a stress fracture in my lower right leg. Then I was going on my first ever backpacking trip with the stress fracture. And I was like, Oh, I’ll be fine.

I would not describe myself as an outdoor person before that backpacking trip. It was in the Smokies. I have this vivid memory of looking at the stars, and just being like, I’m right here right now, and I don’t need to be anywhere else. My mind doesn’t need to be anywhere else because my body’s right here. I just remember after intense days, sticking our feet into the cold water and relaxing or waking up to make pancakes. The simplicity of being out in the forest and performing basic tasks, that is so, so much more fulfilling in the forest than in your day-to-day life.

I ended up having to hike out with a super swollen leg. I ended up having to wear an air boot and be on crutches for a few months after that because of the decision I made to go on that backpacking trip with the stress fracture.

I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder. I was told I had disordered eating.

It was junior year of college where I wanted to lead backpacking trips, and then I started working at the school’s climbing gym and outdoor programs.

Getting involved in the climbing gym, all of a sudden it was like, in order to climb something, I had to fuel my body. If I didn’t eat enough food, I could feel it. Whereas before with running, I felt like I could push through something like that. Then also, I could see this shift in mind. I wasn’t seeking out the scale. Or taking constant selfies to see if I “improved physically.” I was moving my body because I could do things that I never thought I could do before.

I found that being in that community, it was easier to make connections with people, and be like, We’re both here for the same reason: In general, to go up this rock.

The day before graduating from college, me and some friends went out climbing on boulders without a rope. You have crash pads under you. It’s a shorter climb.

It was a super hot day. They’re people who I really wanted to be friends with. I was trying to put up this, Yeah, I’m, I’m cool. I just remember we were at this fun little warmup, where the rock itself was a little higher than I liked. But the two of them climbed it really easily, and I was like, I know I can physically do this.

My hands were at the very top. I could feel how greasy the rock was, so that started playing into my mind. I looked down, I realized how high I was and then my hands just slipped right off.

I landed right on the crash pad where you want to land, but I didn’t land well. The people with me were like, “Oh, that was a great fall.” I looked at my ankle and I was like, “Nope, no that was not.”

I had to go into surgery that week and get hardware in there. I ended up having to be completely non-weight bearing for three months. When I was unable to climb, I learned that I, at the core, am so much more than what I can do with my body and what my body looks like.

It’s so weird, but I sometimes describe it as one of the best summers that I’ve ever had, because I ended up connecting with more people than I had ever connected with. And I started learning pottery. We lived in this really cool house by a creek, and we had chickens and a garden. I found a lot of peace just being surrounded by that sort of energy.

It is so wild to reflect on where I was at freshman year of college compared to where I’m at now. I think then I wanted to control how others perceived me. And now it’s just like, I am who I am, and I’m gonna be perceived the way I’m gonna be perceived. I have no control over that. But I want to be who I am, and I like who I am. And maybe others will like who I am too, because I like who they are.

Ryan Gaglianese-Woody works with fearful dogs as a technician with the ASPCA, and is studying to become a force-free dog trainer. She’s also learning the ropes of sport climbing.

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Suzanne Teune told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It’s like there’s this belief in our society that it’s not abuse unless it’s physical violence.

I remember going over to a friend’s house who had a really supportive family and a healthy family dynamic, and just being so shocked at what I was seeing. And I remember her dad giving her mom a really beautiful compliment and just the kindness in that.

Right now I am in my art studio, which is about an hour outside of Asheville, North Carolina. So you might hear some wind and rain, birds singing. There’s cars going by.

I just finished graduate school in art therapy and clinical counseling, and I’ve worked in mental health for over a decade. I think I’ve always really been a painter and a drawer. Then I started using textiles. My mom used to sew a lot, so I learned from her.

Right now I’m using black walnut ink for the most part, because I have been foraging from the landscape. And since I live here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, there’s a lot of black walnuts around.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. My dad was verbally and emotionally and psychologically abusive, so there was just a lot of fear everywhere. There was definitely a lot of yelling and screaming. If it was just that, then I don’t think that’s necessarily abuse. I think that abuse is taking advantage of a power imbalance to control someone else.

My mom felt very trapped in her marriage. I remember sitting in the van with her in our driveway late at night. I was about five. She told me that she would probably get a divorce if it wasn’t for us kids. That was my earliest memory of that conversation starting, and then it just was ongoing for the next 30 years. I feel like that was 90 percent of the things that my mom and I talked about.

So many people would say things to me like, “Oh, you should be grateful for your parents,” or, “Oh, well, your dad shows you his love by supporting you financially.” I heard that a lot. Actually, I don’t think it’s a helpful response.

I’m estranged from my entire family now.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, there was not a lot of nature around, not a lot of access to nature. But at the end of the block there was this little corner of grass called Dorset Park. So you would walk down this path, and then I guess it was a creek. It was something that was sort of creek-like, if you know the Chicago suburbs at all. But there were cattails growing up around it, and long prairie grass.

When I was young and I didn’t have a car, I was able to go there and I would crawl into that little nook. I could pretend that there weren’t houses around, and that there wasn’t mowed grass behind me, and feel like I was in this little prairie space.

It really did become this magical place for me where I was able to go and feel held by nature. Even though it was really small, it became something really special. I would dance around in circles, and I would make up poetry when I was there, and pray a lot. It did feel very healing. Just this little place that I could go to get away from my dysfunctional house environment.

I ended up going to Wheaton College in my hometown. They have an outdoor wilderness leadership campus. They take people on backpacking trips in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So I did that as an incoming freshman.

There was a leader named Andy and a leader named Eric, and I looked up to them so much. And I think it was being around these really stable, healthy people that I knew I could trust, and I think that is definitely related to them spending lots of time in the wilderness. From there, my love of the outdoors grew.

At this point in my life, it’s super important to me to make sure that I get out in nature. It’s super important for my sanity, I can tell that I need that, and I crave it.

I just spent the last three years in New Mexico. There is a town called White Rock, where there’s a trail that goes down into the canyon by the Rio Grande. And whenever I felt stressed out, I would just go there and sit in the canyon. There was this beautiful spring-fed pool, an idyllic pool, there that I would just hang out in.

Every time I went there, something magical happened. There was a flock of sandhill cranes that came through. They’re so high up in the sky, and they do this circular motion, and they make this honking noise. So beautiful.

One time when I had been really stressed out, there was a lightning storm. And I was just watching this beautiful lightning on the other side of the canyon.

I went there all the time and just felt really held.

For me, I think it’s been a journey of realizing that the landscape is conscious and alive and we can communicate with her, with Mother Earth. And that’s definitely been part of my healing journey, because I have felt alone a lot in my life. I didn’t have anyone in my family I felt really safe with. But then as I started to realize that the landscape is alive, and I can go and talk to her and feel held and feel loved by her, then it’s really hard to feel alone in the world.

Suzanne Teune is a mixed media artist who creates portraits on fabric using natural dyes and inks. She is passionate about healing, and has worked in the mental health field for over a decade as a wilderness therapy field guide, a recovery coach for CooperRiis Healing Community, and an art therapist. You can view her art and find out more about her .

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Elizabeth Madin told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

So I went to get the board off the car, and I remember I was so nervous from all these different things that my hands were shaking. And I thought, Wow, get a grip.

Everything in my life revolves around the ocean, I guess you would say. I grew up in landlocked Kentucky, so there wasn’t much in the way of beach time at home. But every summer my grandparents and my aunt would take us to the beach in Florida, and we’d also spend some time in New Orleans where they lived. So I got a lot of water time then.

Eventually I learned how to SCUBA dive. I ended up spending a semester in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. That’s when I really fell in love with what is now in my field, marine ecology, which is the study of how marine organisms interact with themselves in their environment.

I was a late comer to the surfing game. It was on our honeymoon actually. My husband got really sick the day we got there and so he said, “I’m going to stay in the hotel room and just recover, I’ll see you in a little while. So I thought, OK, I guess I’ll go and hire one of those boards and try to learn how to surf. I took a lesson with a guy at Waikiki who was very patient and understanding. That first time I stood up, it was just so amazing. I mean, when you’re on an 11-foot board, it’s hard not to stand up if someone’s pushing you in waves, which the kind gentleman was doing for me. But I remember standing up and riding along on the face of a wave, or I should say the whitewater of a tiny wave, and it was so exhilarating. I think I just thought, I’ve gotta keep doing this.

Surfing had been a big part of my life. My husband and I lived in Sydney, Australia, where my husband’s from, and all of our children were born there. I didn’t realize how much I missed surfing, until probably our second child. I just had kind of lost what made me, me, I think to some extent.

I used to paint, and I didn’t have time to do art very much. And a lot of the outdoor activities— surfing, rock climbing, stuff I’d done in the past—just really weren’t happening. And I think my husband was feeling pretty similar, because we’re very much both invested and co-parent the children. We made a conscious decision at that point. We loved the friends we had in our inner city neighborhood. But we realized we didn’t really want to raise our children in a concrete world, and that’s kind of what we were having to do.

So, we just picked up shop and moved to the little beach town of Avalon. We were a block from the beach. It just really fit our lifestyle of wanting to be outdoors and in nature.

There were two issues though. One was that I was too nervous to paddle out into what can be quite an intense surf break when it’s really firing. I felt like a beginner starting all over again. I’d lost all my confidence in my ability, and how to deal with waves, and how to be safe in the ocean. So that really felt like just going back to square one.

And also, I didn’t have anyone to look after the kids. Which meant that it was six months that we’d been living there, and I still hadn’t surfed at the break that was a two-minute walk from my house.

A friend then who wasn’t a surfer herself said, “Oh, I heard about this group that’s starting. It’s called Surfing Mums.” They were gonna meet down at Narrabeen, which was about a half an hour away. One parent will be paired up with another parent, and you look after their children and your own children while they surf. Then, after about an hour, they come back from surfing and you swap. I thought, Oh, that sounds intriguing, but I bet they’re all really good and way better than me, and I’m gonna be totally out of my league. But nevertheless, I made myself go to that first meetup.

That first day I remember I was so nervous. My one daughter was with me, and she was about one. I thought, I’m not even gonna get the board off the roof because I’m not gonna surf.

I remember then I met them, and they were so nice. Kristy, who started the group, said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s fine. I mean, if you don’t want to go out, that’s fine. But I’m really happy to look after your daughter.” And I thought, Oh, should I, shouldn’t I? I just met these people. Leaving my child with total strangers at a beach I’m not familiar with in waves that are probably a little too big for me.But anyway, I made myself do that.

I went out for a pretty short sesh, came back. My daughter was still happy and alive, and everyone else there was happy to cheer everyone else on. And it really felt liberating to know that now I’d solved the equation of how I’m gonna be able to surf while being a part-time marine biologist, and a mother and, and everything else.

I ended up thinking, OK, yes, I’ve gotta do this every week. They met every Friday. So I basically rearranged my meeting schedule. I asked a friend if she could help get my older daughter to school, so that I could get there on time.

It just really gave me a new energy and a new dimension to my life that I realized at that point really had been missing.

There are all these benefits, such as the children getting time outdoors with other children, just playing on the beach, playing in nature. The network of support that it builds among the parents. Within about three or four months, we were taking surf trips, like moms-only surf trips, to other places. And that really cemented that whole feeling of, yeah, this is a tribe of women that are there for each other and want to help each other get what they need, which for all of us, the commonality was time in the ocean.

In order to be the best parent, I found that I really did have to fill my cup as well. And Surfing Mums did that for me.

Fast forward four years or so, my husband and I both got offers to be faculty at the University of Hawaii. And as much as we did not want to leave that community, these were our dream jobs. This opportunity wasn’t gonna come along again anytime soon.

So, when we got to Hawaii, I just followed what we did in Australia. A couple of people showed up that first day, and it just built from there.

And now if anyone is interested in finding a group or starting a group, we have a . We have more than 20 groups around the country, from New Jersey to California, to Texas, to now, I think there’s one in Oregon. So it’s really exciting and it’s grown amazingly well. What’s really made it grow has been this team of women that all have phenomenal skills and intellect and passion for what they do, and for helping other women and families grow their villages of support centered around surfing.

My advice for anyone who’s in a similar situation where they have maybe young children, or any children, and they want to get back to outdoor activities is, the Surfing Moms model is not unique to surfing. It can be applied to just about anything that can be done in about an hour or so. It only takes one other person to show up on a given week, and you can do that thing.

It could be rock climbing moms. It could be, I don’t know, hang gliding moms. But, certainly, anything like that people like to do and they need help to look after their children, the model applies.

Elizabeth Madin is a mother of three, an associate professor of marine biology at the University of Hawaii, and the founder of Surfing Moms.

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Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn told her story to producer Sarah Fuss Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Nine, ten-year-old me is probably going, “What are you doing? You know you can drown! What are you doing?”

I’m a journalist by trade, and I love connecting with nature. I have a side gig working at the parks department in a natural area space in Culver City in the Los Angeles area.

I decided, sometime around 2019, that I would be writing a book about my grandmother. We had traveled to Tennessee, where my mother’s family is from. And I had realized that this was the first time, in my recollection, that I had visited her grave site.

I’ve never written about my life or about my family’s life in the way that I’m attempting to now. I’m digging a lot deeper and going a lot further with stories that may uncover things that may hurt, but that can also be healing.

My mother’s mother died when my mother was ten, in 1950, from a botched tubal ligation surgery after she gave birth to her fourth child. And so I’ve been on this journey now to reclaim my grandmother’s story.

I come from generations of people that are like, “Don’t air dirty laundry. Don’t talk about things that hurt.” Things like racism, womanhood, poverty, and religion. I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying than to talk to your parents about things that you’re ashamed of, or to ask them things that they might feel ashamed of, or things that might have been hurtful to them. But I wanted to be brave. And I wanted to challenge myself. I really, really want to be more courageous in my writing. I just wanted to find a way to take the plunge, and immerse myself in this new journey.

The Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica was hosting a polar plunge in December. I had friends that had done polar plunges before, but I thought, Oh no, that’s not what I do. I don’t plunge into the ocean. Because getting into the water is not necessarily my jam.

I had to be about eight or nine, I was at my friend’s. I was sitting on the edge of the pool, just dangling my feet in the water. And some kid who I didn’t know just took it upon himself to push me into the deep end of the pool. I went down. I will never forget that.

I do remember feeling very heavy, feeling very frantic. And the next thing I knew, I was being lifted out of the water by my friend’s uncle who had seen me go down. Knowing that I could drown really did become a challenge for me, even when I was learning how to swim in my 40s. So I just stayed away from the water.

The Annenberg Polar Bear Plunge. I got there early. None of my friends wanted to go, and so I was just trying to make sure that I had a lay of the land, that I understood what I was getting myself into. I felt like this was an opportunity to just venture out a little further. Metaphorically that meant something to me, for what I wanted to do in my writing.

Walking into this water, and just feeling the chill lap up against my ankles and my feet and my legs. I put on all kinds of Vaseline because I was like, I’m gonna wick it away, but it still comes through. When I first got in, I thought, Oh, there’s no way I can keep going, and it not chill me to the bone.

There was another woman there who suggested that I go into the water, come out, go into the water, and come out, and acclimate myself to the temperature of the water. And so I kind of took my cues from her. Every time I would go out, I would get a little further up. I let it get up to my shoulders, and that was as far up as I could go and still be touching the floor of the ocean.

One of the big waves came and just went over my head. But that I was able to stay rooted and stay grounded in the ocean was so gratifying, despite how cold it was. At a certain point it wasn’t about it being so cold—and it was so cold—it was just about being able to be stable and knowing that I was gonna be okay. Making it through this experience felt like I could do anything.

I didn’t feel scared because I was with a community of people. I know that the water can be very violent and can kill and destroy. But I also know that water is healing and connective matrilineally. I felt like my grandmother was in the midst of all this. Because there was a stranger who was like, “I’m gonna help you get acclimated to this,” and it was another woman who was reaching out with care.

I do believe that we’re not here alone, that we are part of a whole, that includes the people that came before us. Otherwise, generational trauma wouldn’t be a thing. And it most definitely is, but there’s also generational healing and generational connectedness.

I’ve had these really courageous, independent-minded women in my family and in my history. But I’m just now discovering all the things that they had to journey through to buck against systems that told them they didn’t have a voice, or they shouldn’t have a voice, or they shouldn’t be entrepreneurial, or that they shouldn’t have the kind of lives that they had. To know that I come from that kind of courage, that kind of bravery, and that kind of fortitude, emboldens me to keep going.

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is a journalist, author, and adjunct instructor at University of Southern California Annenberg’s Specialized Journalism Program. She is also a recreation services leader for , a public garden in Los Angeles County.

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