Health in Nature
About Our Program
One of Sutro Stewards’ core principles is that experiencing nature, wildness, and adventure is critical to healthy, meaningful, and joyful lives--and that everyone should be able to benefit from access to wild nature.
Through the Health in Nature program, Sutro Stewards and UCSF are uniquely poised to build on our expertise and use it to address systemic racism as experienced by our low-income communities of color in the form of unequal access to nature and health inequities. By implementing a program of nature immersion geared towards this population, we hope to take one step closer to closing the nature access gap.
More and more research indicates that access to nature can...
-
Reduce rates of chronic illnesses through stress relief
-
Encourage physical activity
-
Strengthen social connections
Our Connection to Nature is Sacred.
Sutro Stewards is piloting a Health in Nature Program in partnership with UCSF and various community organizations throughout San Francisco with the intention of increasing access to the outdoors to vulnerable and underserved populations that could benefit deeply from time spent in nature. We are continually learning from the communities we serve about the effects of the nature immersion programs. By using methods such as Participatory Action Research and Community Based Participatory Research, we aim to shape our programs based on each group's feedback.
Nature immersion is based on existing research about outdoor programming and includes activities such as:
-
Wellness walks
-
Body-mind centering and meditation
-
Making herbal teas
-
Crafting medicine bundles
-
Nature games and art
-
Sharing ancestral knowledge
-
Adopting a plant
-
Individual group care of a mountain site
-
Seed sowing and cleaning
-
Trail care
… to name a few of the possibilities!