How we reached 2023 Best Places to Work status

November 1, 2023
Valerie Beichner
Uncategorized

In 2019 Venture Outdoors looked a lot different.

October 21, 2023 marks four years since I took the helm at Venture Outdoors, and coincidentally, I was asked to provide a keynote speech to share the Venture Outdoors story. And oh what a story it’s been!

In 2019, I started a discussion with the board of directors to update our mission statement from “we get all outside” to; We remove barriers and create access to outdoor experiences. I wanted to acknowledge and pay homage to the 20 years of outdoor experiences that Venture Outdoors created for residents and tourists, while also recognizing there were several communities that we had not yet served well enough.

We took a hard look at our data and identified who was missing from the “all” that we claimed to serve. Together we determined core communities to focus on including BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, women and non-binary, and body positivity.

How would we pivot to serve people who faced significant barriers to outdoor experiences like safety, systemic racism, body image, and access? To do this, we had to start within.

We had to pivot from “all” to authentic.

Our goal was to create meaningful relationships with other organizations and communities while acknowledging work that needed to be done internally. To be authentic in our relationships and engagement with communities, we created the board equity statement, the staff equity statement, mandated monthly DEI training for staff members, and hired a Director of Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Four years later, the paths to achieving our mission are revealing themselves.

That internal work is what led us to become one of 2023’s best places to work. It was important for us to be a place of belonging first. We changed a lot about the employee experience; everything from how we hire, to our pay rates, to how staff utilize holidays, to parental leave and a nursing space in the office, to additional PTO and mental health benefits. All of this was to better serve the team we had while we prepare to expand to the dream team.

Our community programming has made significant headway in volunteership and participation from our focus communities. Our youth programs continue to reach our focus communities and serve them better and better each year. We are making a shift into workforce development with Pennsylvania’s first ACA Pro Paddle School. Most of all, we’re acknowledging that there are things that we’re not quite ready to do and are yet to come in terms of DEI.

To our members, volunteers, participants and supporters, thank you so much for being a part of this journey! We love what we do. We love who we do it with. And we love who we do it for.