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Lucienne Nicholson Fosters Diversity in the Woods

Lucienne Nicholson

Lucienne Nicholson in her suburban garden, which she calls a "small farm.” Photos courtesy of Lucienne Nicholson.

Lucienne Nicholson is many things: a mother, an immigrant, a hiker, an enthusiastic gardener, a beach lover, and a wholehearted admirer of nature and its power to heal. She is also the founder of Inclusive Woods and Us, a Rochester, New York-based nonprofit officially established in 2019 to “increase equitable access to the outdoors for children, families, and communities of people of color in lower socioeconomic standing as a way to improve the physical, mental and spiritual health of vulnerable populations.” Her deep love of the natural world began as a child in Haiti and has sustained her through many life challenges – including losing access to the outdoors as a teenage immigrant – and inspired her endeavor to share nature with others.


In Haiti, I had a double existence. I was born in Port-au-Prince, and during the academic calendar months, from October to June, I lived in the concrete jungle of a chaotic capital.  However, I was quite fortunate that my grandmother still lived in the hills in the northeast area of Haiti. So I was able to spend every summer of my childhood there until I moved to the United States at age 16. These were summers of magic. This was where I discovered lightning bugs, where I watched hawks and hummingbirds, where I saw water coming from the ground under my feet that was so pristine and clean that I could drink from it. It was where I learned everything about the interconnectedness between people and nature and that we really are one.

The farmhouse was dwarfed by towering giant mahogany trees and mighty Haitian Oak trees (Bois de Chêne). My gaze could not travel far, sometimes only steps, before it hit the next wall of green above and all around me. Though I absolutely loved that big green engulf, there were times when I craved open and flat stretches of land too. So La Savane (Savannah), also part of my ancestral grounds, became my special wonderland. That open field with tall, swaying, golden grasses in rushing wind, where a small child can magically disappear in plain sight, was beckoning.

Lucienne Nicholson

Nicholson in her garden.

That farm is where I learned about the understory and learned about canopies, not because I was taught the words, but because I lived them. My grandmother was a coffee farmer and cacao farmer. It was grown naturally in the understory, under the tall trees. I learned about humus and the decay of the earth and how things get recycled. There was a relationship where you felt like you were part of nature, but nature was in charge. I learned that from my grandmother and my great aunts and my great-grandmother. They harvested respectfully, because they knew that if they abused it, there may not be more for when they needed it again. There was always a consideration of how to respect nature as a mother and nurturer.

Immigrating to the northeastern United States brought many changes, some great and others not so wonderful. We lived in the East Flatbush district of Brooklyn in New York City, a community of immigrants from different Caribbean nations. I didn’t know the language, didn’t know the culture, and the high school I went to was being desegregated by force. Because I was bussed out of my working class, immigrant community to go to a school in a suburb, I quickly realized not all of Brooklyn was concrete and noise and lights constantly on. I discovered we had green space in America. There were parks. There were streets lined with trees. It was a natural thing for me to want to be in that kind of space.

Racial segregation kept me away from the beautiful and well-kept parks, which were a mere bus ride from my own community. I was not welcomed and was even threatened with physical violence if I were to “trespass” the invisible line of segregation. I have learned since that there are rivers in America. There are mountains. There are trails. Everything that I had left in my grandmother’s region, they exist here. As a teenager, I learned from both native whites and native Blacks that I was not allowed to go there or great harm will come to me. This is not freedom. This is not an opportunity. This is not advancement. Any place that can separate you from nature cannot be wholesome, cannot be healthy.

When I was 22 years old, I decided to leave New York for South Florida. My new town, Miami, did not have much to offer in the form of vast forests and woodlands. But it gave me the ocean. Being from Haiti, the beach is a place I could go to talk with nature. I have told so much to the ocean that it could write an entire series about my life. In Florida, that was my interaction with nature. It’s where I started to feel a sense of renewal and belongingness. The ocean never chased me away.

Lucienne Two glasses

Nicholson at Allegany State Park, Cattaraugus County, New York, with her “two glasses trademark.”

The deep woods just had to wait. Although I had to wait some 30 years after my immigration, at last, my move to the Finger Lakes Region opened the gateway to the Adirondacks. This much-delayed reunion felt like a homecoming, making me feel fully alive. I have been in the Rochester area for the last 15 years. I live in Pittsford, and I moved here because it was one of the top school districts in the nation, and I wanted my three children to have a good education.

While I was still raising my two youngest sons, I volunteered in three different elementary schools in the city of Rochester. To my dismay, none of the schools had green spaces where the children could go outside to play, to see trees, and to relax. The children would arrive by school bus and enter a building until it was time to get back on the bus. They were going from container to container, from the school building to the church building to the building where they live. Concrete to concrete to concrete.

A lot of the children don’t even have a lawn, so they have no grass to step on. They have no trees. They have nothing that connects them back to nature. In these school hallways, in these beautiful children I saw myself in two ways: I was at once the little girl running free with dragonflies in the countryside in Haiti, and also the young immigrant teenager in Brooklyn, completely cut off from nature. That confrontation awoke in me a promise that I made to myself decades before, and it was to provide access to nature for poor, working class children living in urban spaces.

There is a key component that was not being addressed, and that was finding a release valve for the children – pulling them away from the fire hydrant to a river’s edge, pulling them away from the tall building to a true mountain, getting them off the hot concrete to good soil under their feet. I know that nature heals. Now we have scientific studies that confirm the critical need for access to nature for all children.

Lucienne Nicholson

Nicholson learns to canoe in the Adirondacks.

Inclusive Woods and Us focuses on the children, because often they are the ones who get left behind. If you look at most of the outdoor groups in the Black space, they tend to be focused on adults. With Woods and Us, I want to teach the children I have met and who don’t have any access to be stewards but also to be healed by nature. I want them to see nature in a drop of rain, in an unfurling leaf. Nature is always around us. I teach them how to see it by organizing specific programming for children.

Right now we work with 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. But the idea is to eventually start them in the stroller – to get the parents involved. Inclusive Woods and Us connects with community centers and other places that have children living in very stressful situations. We’re very focused on socioeconomic standing, on the children and families who have been alienated from nature and who don’t have the capacity financially to explore the outdoors.

Exclusion of non-white people in America’s wilderness and even local trails and parks is real. I have experienced it. I know what it feels like to be excluded from nature. I also know that Black and brown peoples are apprehensive about being in the woods in America. Central to the mission of Inclusive Woods and Us is recognizing the urgent need to create the safety and belongingness hikers need.

Lucienne Nicholson in the woods

A group walks along a trail near Rochester during an Inclusive Woods and Us outing.

The principle stumbling blocks to getting people from urban areas into the outdoors include lack of economic resources, lack of education about and exposure to the outdoors, lack of transportation, lack of gear including proper clothing for the seasonal elements, and the ever looming concerns over encountering racism on a lonely trail. Educating people about the benefits of being in nature and finding ways to help with the financial burden of procuring gear and finding transportation are important pieces of the puzzle.

As the founder of Woods and Us, I live my passion every day for the community to see. Seeing a person who looks like them living the truth of the wonders of nature helps encourage people to get outside.

I’m remarried. My husband grew up in the Adirondack region, is a white male. He goes to the Adirondacks all the time. When he goes with me, he is noticed because of my presence. I can handle people staring at me, I cannot handle people wanting to do me harm. Some people of color cannot take what I call “the gaze.” That gaze that tells you, “You don’t belong.” That gaze that tells you, “I don’t like you. I don’t want you here.”

My white, suburban friends have fears that I share with them. The fear of a bear. The fear of poison ivy. The fear of getting lost. But what we don’t have in common is the fear of rejection; the fear of physical safety from other human beings. This is something that has to be dealt with and respected and put in perspective. If you feel this way as a parent, you not only will not take yourself into the outdoors, you will teach your child to stay away too. This surreal reality will continue, unless people start to show up and push back and claim space and look for allies to make this happen safely.

Deep woods

Nicholson at Allegany State Park, Cattaraugus County, New York.

I called the organization Inclusive Woods and Us for a reason. I am not trying to eliminate you from the woods so I can enter the woods. The way to bring Black people into nature is through white people’s action too. My biggest message is, yes I’m working hard at this, but it’s not going to amount to much if we don’t have a white body of thinkers in the space of nature to drive the message by example, to create space, and to explain why it is untenable and unnatural to exclude people of color. Consider yourself complicit if you don’t notice that I’m missing. If you don’t notice that I am missing, you are not having a full, natural experience. You have to start imagining me as belonging, as necessary, as important and welcome.

There’s a direct connection to Inclusive Woods and Us and an increase of people going out into the outdoors, some of them for the first time. They don’t have to come to me; they don’t have to come through Woods and Us. It’s the idea of changing mindset. It’s a paradigm shift. If it’s me always taking my community to the woods, I have not achieved anything. It’s my capacity to show them, it’s within you, and you are needed in the woods, and you need the woods.

My friends and neighbors see me outdoors, and they ask me where to go to get outside. Right now, because of Covid, I have had to stop all Woods and Us activities. So I pivoted. I formed a group called Rochester Hiking Unicorns. It’s not formalized like Woods and Us, but it’s a way to encourage people to get outside. Rochester Hiking Unicorns is an inclusive and welcoming outdoors group of friends who are of Japanese heritage, Indian, American-born Black people, people from countries in Africa and the Caribbean, and European Americans too. I have people who live in subsidized housing, people who live in big houses; it’s urban and suburban. Wherever I am in the woods, I want to experience our collective humanity. We are one in nature’s eyes.

Whether it’s through Inclusive Woods and Us or the Rochester Hiking Unicorns, at the end of each hike, the children and adults who entered the woods for the first time are not the same returning home. Often, starting out, people feel a mixed bag of anxiety, excitement, and boredom. Within the first quarter-mile of a hike, nature does its magic. People begin to fall in, to surrender to the goodness of nature. Chatter is reduced to murmur. Hands are brought to cover mouths in wonder of a flying blue jay or a titmouse. A tiny racing squirrel becomes an object of extreme curiosity. The transformation is real and unforgettable. That first awe is priceless. And watching the bodies move from restrained state to full freedom of movement is the greatest reward.

Discussion *

Aug 14, 2022

Thank you Lucienne, for raising my awareness of this issue. Your garden is a beautiful tribute to your grandmother ‘s farm in Haiti . As a fellow hiker and garden enthusiast, I never realized that people were being threatened and discouraged from enjoying nature. God bless you in your noble pursuit.

Nancy E Holley
Aug 16, 2020

I enjoyed reading about Lucienne and the important work she is doing.  Growing up as a white kid in a small city, I loved a large nearby park that gave me a touch of the natural world.  Later on, hiking and family camping trips introduced me to much more and helped me to develop a lifelong love of the outdoors.  Lucienne is making a big difference in the lives of the kids she is working with.

Tom McKone
Aug 11, 2020

I’m very happy to see this excellent article in Northern Woodlands and hope that Lucienne Nicholson has nothing but success in her important work.

Jan Whitaker
Aug 09, 2020

Excellent article! Good for her! Having grown up in a mixed community in NJ and been a Girl Scout many years ago, it never dawned on me until very recently that people of color did not feel welcome in outdoor places. She has brought it home beautifully and without rancor. I will think differently now.Thank you for publishing this!

Priscilla Sands

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