This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by the REI Co-op, which is encouraging people to opt outside this holiday season.

Get outside and get the people around you to do the same.

And no one embodies that idea more than Jenny Bruso, the founder of Unlikely Hikers and an RAI member since 2014.

Unlikely Hikers is my Instagram community that I created about a year ago that features the underrepresented

outdoors person. Since pretty much forever there's been not much diversity in

media depictions of people going outside but thanks to people like Jenny, that's slowly changing.

I primarily feature people of color, people of size, uh,

trans people, gender non-binary folks, uh, differently abled people and so on, and I feature their stories.

And that's just Jenny's day job.

At night, at least one night a month, she puts on an event called Queer Adventure Storytelling.

A live show that brings together the LGBTQ community to tell stories of times they got outside

their comfort zone and the outdoors.

Things didn't go as planned.

And our goal with this event is to build community,

a community of queer adventurers

and you know sort of change the the storyline

of whose adventure stories we're hearing most of the time.

In other words, she's telling the people around her to go have adventures and then come talk about it

because we all want to see ourselves outside.

When we don't see ourselves represented in things, sometimes we decide that they aren't for us.

And if you want to see yourself represented in something, sometimes you have to be the person to make that happen.

You can join the movement by sharing your outdoor stories and inspirations with the hashtag opt-out side.

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