The Power of Storytelling: Danielle Williams & Melanin Base Camp

Hi, all. You'll notice a bonus episode in your feed this week. I talked to the Teresa Baker and Daniel Williams about the outdoor CEO diversity pledge and camera outdoors. I hope you'll give it a listen to learn more about the importance of Teresa's work. Now, on with the show. I'm Gail Straub and you're listening to she explores. So story telling is important because that's how people learn, you know, before the internet and, you know, newspapers, you know, you pass things along through your family by telling the story. And so I think it's important to keep that tradition up so other people can learn from your mistakes or can kind of learn how to get stronger or, you know, how to plan a trip better. It's just like it's a great way to learn and it's an interesting way, an easy way to be a smarter person in this world. I feel like storytelling is so important and I love that melanin base camp kind of does that. It allows not only the featured bloggers, but other people to tell their stories, other adventure athletes to talk about their experiences or highlight other people in their experiences because there's a lot of interviews as well and we're starting to get into gear reviews as well. It's just so important right now because I feel like we need that we need that storytelling in order to bring the humanity back to diverse and different people, you know. That was Dr. Fabia Dubic and Nadia Mercado, two bloggers for melanin base camp, a website founded by Daniel Williams to increase the visibility of adventure athletes of color, largely through storytelling. In interviewing Danielle, there's a lot we could dig into. She's a skydiver and started team black star skydivers, a community for skydivers of color. She's third generation military, she's coping with complications from rheumatic fever that have left her unable to run and do a lot of the things that she used to be able to do. She's also one of the founding members of diversify outdoors, a coalition of social media influencers who share the goal of promoting diversity in outdoor spaces. The website also hosts Teresa Baker's outdoor CEO diversity pledge. So for this episode with everything that we could highlight about Danielle, I want to take the time and the opportunity to highlight Danielle's work with melanin base camp and the power of storytelling. And in particular, the power of telling your own story and listening to the personal stories of others. So the first question I was careful to phrase based on one of the articles. So what sort of outdoor activities did you enjoy growing up? Oh, I love that. Yeah, so I grew up with a mom who was really active in the outdoors and both of my parents were active duty military. So they both did a lot of running. So I remember like when I was three or four, my mom would take my twin brother and I to the track, like on one of the bases in New York. And she would run around the track and like we would play and do a little bit of running and play. And that's kind of how I got started after turn five. I started running with her like every day during the summer. And she really kind of developed this like lifelong love of running, which is a little bit ironic because running something I can't do anymore. But I like, I'm so really appreciative of, you know, having like 29 almost 30 years of being able to be very active and running a lot. So I really love running. That was my first love and one of my favorite activities to do. That article I referenced is one that lives on Melon and Beast Camp and is written by Nadia Mercado. That article was so personal. And when I wrote it like when I hit to publish it, I felt like I had my heart in my hands. Because I feel like ever since I started hiking and climbing and skydiving, you know, this narrative that I see are people doing epic things, you know, they're backpacking, they're running a beautiful trail or they're skydiving or they're skiing or snowboarding or they're kayaking in a beautiful river. Somewhere wonderful like pristine Alaska. And for me, that just wasn't my reality. And for a lot of families in South Florida that isn't the reality, we don't have mountains here. We have local parks. All of our trails are paved. We don't necessarily have a backcountry unless you want to go out to the Everglades and kind of wait in the swamps with the alligators. So for us, you know, our outdoor experiences are something as simple as going to a park and jogging along the trail there or having a picnic with your family or playing soccer. I realized that I had this narrative that I was introduced to the outdoors when I was 24 with my first hike in Arches National Park. But in reality, I was always outside. If I wasn't running or jogging, I was playing soccer or I was out in the beach. I had odd 10 lines because my shorts would hit one way and the sun would hit it or my socks were coming up in a funny way. Or my shirt was like covering up my arms in awkward way that day. So I started realizing that the story I was there like I was outside. It's just that that story wasn't being told. And I think that it's kind of given me a bit of a direction now with mom and base camp. I feel like there's plenty of people who are able to tell their stories doing epic things like climbing and backpacking and kayaking snowboarding skiing. But I want to do now is I want to highlight ordinary people doing regular things like going outside and gardening or going out to the park and playing basketball every day, every evening. There's people that do that here because those are outdoor experiences. They may not be very epic and they may not be as geared oriented, but that doesn't make them any less important. Going outside is going outside and studies prove that time outside does help your health. And I might not be able to get people in my community out to Arches National Park, but I know that I could get them to the beach. I know that I could get them over to Westwin Park to play a game of soccer or to have a picnic. So I think that's the direction that I'm trying to go in now. Nadia's article had both myself and Danielle questioning the stories we tell ourselves about how we got into the outdoors and what we consider outdoors each day. And I know it's come up in past episodes too, even last weeks with Ginny and Pash. So if it keeps coming up, why do we keep doing it? Why do we keep perpetuating the same stories? It definitely made me think about the fact that people don't always even think about running as an outdoor activity. Like, why do you think that is? I don't know, like, that's kind of a question I've thought a lot about. And like, I love the fact that you kind of brought up Nadia's article. And I love the article because it really kind of delves into which activities we place value on and which activities we devalue. And I don't know, maybe it's just not like hardcore or maybe it's something that you can do in any environment, like you can run in an urban environment, in a rural environment, it just like, you don't need gear, right? You don't need to take like a couple of days off of work to climb a mountain or anything like that, you can. But it's a really accessible sport. So maybe because it is like very accessible, maybe we just place less value on it. And I think there are other sports like that I remember interviewing actually one of our bloggers and because again, I was like asking that sort of question like, hey, how did you get interested in the outdoors? I was still asking that kind of question. And he had just been telling me about how like he grew up playing soccer all the time, like with his friends and family. And when I asked him what got you into the outdoors, kind of like entirely dismissing when he had just told me, he told me, oh, I didn't get into the outdoors until college. And then like I had a minute and I'm like, wait a minute, I know you were in the outdoors as a child because you just described like playing soccer like every day, but you know, maybe soccer is something like running where because you don't need a lot of money to do it or because it's easy access because it's not like hardcore in quotation marks, maybe it's just something that I don't know, it doesn't meet the requirements. Do you find that you learn a lot through this work like like in asking different questions like not checking yourself, but learning from other people's experiences to kind of change your language and what your assumptions are. Yeah, I definitely do. Yeah, just even with that question alone, I do have to check myself in kind of. like it helps me with my own kind of like self-awareness because I think if someone had asked me maybe 10 years ago, like, hey, we got you into the outdoors or whatever, I would say, hey, I've been a runner since I was a little girl. But after just recently being in this like outdoor community or outdoor industry for the past two or three years, when people would ask me a similar question, we got you into being outdoors, I would say, oh, I was in the outdoors until college or until the army. And then you know, that's when I started hiking and camping blah, blah, blah, blah and it was work, but they made me do it, right? So that was kind of my story. My entire story changed and it wasn't authentic. It wasn't accurate, but I was changing my story to meet other people's expectations, which is something that like Nadia talks about. So I love that issue because we all do it. It's not just like a racial thing or an ethnic thing. I think as a community, we just have to be really kind of aware and cognizant of why we value which activities. And like, how can we change that? And how can we change our language? And it even goes back to the community that I helped run Melon and Basecamp when I first got started like all over the website, everything was adventure athlete and adventurous sports. And you still see some of that language, right? And then over time, I realized like that language can be kind of like not super welcoming to people from my own community who may not identify as adventure athletes who may, they may walk every evening, but they wouldn't call that hiking, right? Especially if they're from a rural area, just taking a walk or whatever. So it has helped me to like be really hyper aware of the language that I use and what connotations are associated with that language and how my welcoming people are maybe unintentionally excluding them by the language that I use. So yeah, something I struggle with. - Yeah, no, I definitely struggle with it too. And even just hearing you talk, it made me think of like, an adventure spectrum, but even with the spectrum, there's almost like a rating scale on it. So it immediately have to kind of throw away that language. So I like that the work that you're doing is sharing stories which I find that stories have less judgment attached in just the telling of them. - Definitely for sure. Yeah, 'cause you know, people can debate your politics or your worldview all day long in me, feel immediately defensive, but it's hard to feel defensive about someone else's lived experience. They're just telling you the story of their life, right? It's hard to kind of like immediately feel defensive about that. - Yeah, hopefully. (laughing) - Part of Danielle's story and the origin of melanin-based camp is the way her life has changed and shifted her outlook since getting sick with rheumatic fever three years ago. - I had rheumatic fever, which I got when I was overseas, or I was living in the Philippines for work. And I got sick there and I wasn't diagnosed there. I wasn't diagnosed over a year later when I got back. I just kept getting sick and no one really knew why or what the cause was. So I was living in North Carolina at the time doing my regular job in the military. And there's like a big hospital in Maryland. So I was actually sent up to the hospital in Maryland for treatment. They have like an infectious diseases program here. So I got diagnosed. I got treated and because of that illness, I've had some other illnesses resulting from that, which affect like walking, talking, and like I've been in voluntary movements and things like that. So I'm still receiving regular treatment. And I would say like that has been a really awful experience, but it's also been a really good experience because it forced me to slow down. I didn't have a choice, right? So my life kind of came to a halt. And before I got sick, I was active all the time, you know, really busy with the work. And then on the weekend, I was jumping, jumping, jumping, love skydiving. And didn't really have time in my life for anything else. I wasn't doing any writing. I hadn't really connected with like other people outside of my own immediate community. So ironically, it was getting sick, which gave me the time to like think outside of my own foxhole, as we say, in the military, to think a little bit bigger and to start to connect with other people and to start writing. And so yeah, like that's been one great thing that has come of like having a disability and having to slow down. And yeah, it kind of expanded my world in a lot of ways just to be honest. Like I didn't really think of other people who were living with this disability until I was living with a disability myself. That's just the honest truth. So it's had me kind of like reviving my whole life. And like, you know, the disabled community, whether you say that or people living with disability, that is the biggest minority group in the US period, right? So yeah, I really forced me to slow down. It forced me to think about other marginalized communities and you know, what were some of my past behaviors or language or things that were completely erasing this entire community that I never thought about. And now that I'm in it, like, what can I do better? How can I connect with other people? And how can, you know, I connect with other people who can kind of relate to things I struggle with on a daily basis, which is, you know, in the army, they teach you just try harder or, you know, work harder and like, achieve your goals, but like trying harder won't make me less sick, you know? Like trying harder won't, you know, make me hike faster. Won't give me the ability to hike period, right? Like sometimes in my life I'm doing treatment and sometimes, you know, I can't hike and I can't jump. And there are a lot of things I can't do. And that doesn't make me any less of a person the fact that I'm not being active. It just means my life is different. And yeah, it's just been a lot of adjusting. - How did skydiving change from before to after? Like, and I don't have any frame of reference for skydiving besides what I've read about it and heard you speak about it. 'Cause I've never done it because I'm definitely afraid of, you know, I lump myself into the fear camp (laughing) what I think about that particular activity. - Yeah, I would say like first of all skydiving is a pretty accessible sport, meaning even though I have difficulty walking and there are a lot of things I can't do like on their ground. Falling is pretty easy, not to put down my sport, but yeah, it's really accessible. There are folks who are paraplegic who have single leg amputees or missing arms or limbs or who can still skydive, right? It's a very accessible sport. So I appreciate that, right? So the fact that even though I can't run, I can still jump has been really cool. But I would say from a practical standpoint, I'm just jumping a lot less. I'm not at the drops end every weekend. And I would say from another point of view, it's really kind of helped me, huh, how would I say this? Like skydiving like any other adventurous sport community, I think there's this mantra that we repeat over and over again. And I like to call it positive vibes culture, right? No one really wants to talk about illness. If you have cancer, great, don't talk about it. They don't want to talk about the fact that you have depression or anxiety or just lost a loved one or whatever. And it's not people trying to be mean. It's just kind of like the where culture is set up. And I was the same way. When I first started skydiving, I was like prophesizing my sport all over, right? And what I was saying was basically like, hey, my life was like stressed and hard or whatever before I started skydiving. But now I found this amazing community and people are so fun and welcoming and hospitable. And now my life is great. And that's kind of like where the discussion ends. No one wants to dig deeper than that. But I think the truth is whatever issues you had before skydiving, you probably have them after skydiving. And I joke around like if you have depression or anxiety, don't mistake your parachute for your medication 'cause it's not the same thing, right? But I think you can look at that and view it as an opportunity to just be more transparent and more open and more vulnerable because I can't check my disability at the door just because I want to go jump for the weekend. So I think it's given me an opportunity to just be a little bit more reflective and honest about my life, right? Because I have a visible disability. But it's also encouraged me to try to be a better listener because there are definitely people who have invisible disabilities or just life is hard. They're people who are dealing with issues and kind of the rule or the game plan as you check that at the door once you get to the job zone. But why should we, right? If we're friends for a community, whatever we deal with in real life, in quotation marks, we also deal with as skydivers. And I think there's such an incredible opportunity there to just be better listeners, to be better friends, to not just be acquaintances who meet up and jump on the weekend, but to be people who care deeply about each other and who want to hear what your friend or the other person across the aisle from you and the plane is going through. And I think definitely being someone with a visible disability, it's given me an opportunity to be more compassionate, not that I am, but it's a goal, right, to try to be more compassionate. Yeah, and that's kind of become a goal of mine, 'cause that just doesn't apply to things that people go through individually. It applies to areas of risk for it that, hey, how can we do better? How can we be more welcoming, more inclusive, eliminate bad stuff in our community, like sexual harassment and sexual assault? Well, we can't if we don't talk about it. And I think, I don't know, maybe cracking this facade of like, everything's perfect. My life is amazing because I'm a skydiver and you should do it too, right? I can't, like, I can't. really sell that anymore. No one's buying that pitch if I sell it to people, because you know, my life is, you know, they're ups and downs and sometimes I'm jumping sometimes I'm not and sometimes I'm there and and kind of I don't want to be. So I think it's just giving me an opportunity to try to be a more compassionate person. Like that's what I'm trying to work on. We'll hear more from Danielle, Nadia and Fabia after this. Before I found third love bras, I have to say I knew a lot less about my breasts. Third love is all about finding the perfect fit, which is why they carry half sizes, resulting in more sizes than most other brands. Third love makes it easy to find that perfect fit with their fit finder quiz. 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Go to thirdlove.com/explore now to get your perfect fitting bra and get 15% off your purchase. That's thirdlove.com/explore for 15% off today. Danielle is the type of friend that you may not necessarily want all the time, but that you need because she's the type of friend who will be honest with you at all times. And there have been so many times that I've done crazy decisions and have tried to do things that weren't going to be to my best interest and I've told Danielle about them and she's been like no girl, I don't think that's a good idea. We're back. This is Nadia again, sharing some thoughts about Danielle because sometimes it's nice to get some help telling your story. Danielle is motivating people through helping them tell their stories on melanin-based camp. So when you started melanin-based camp, it was first an Instagram handle, right? It started on Instagram. So it sounds like that paralleled the time in your life when you were being diagnosed with your disability. Was that what you were saying in looking out of your foxhole, looking to other communities and connecting with people, taking that time? Was that part of the spark that started you wanting to have that create that platform? Yeah, it definitely was and I guess a practical part of it was just I had more downtime because I was sick and I couldn't jump especially initially. Also, it kind of aligned with the fact that I had been running Team Black Star Skydivers, which is another group that I'm a part of that promotes diversity in skydiving. I've been doing that for two years, and so I felt like I was pretty well connected within the skydiving community to other people of color, right? Because I wasn't trying to overcome that feeling of being the only one, the only person who looks like you doing whatever it is that you love to do. So I felt like pretty well rooted within skydiving and I was just really curious as well as like what is the experience like for other people of color in different outdoor communities? Is it the same? Because you know, there are things that are very particular to being a black skydiver, right? Like I know I'm a six foot one African American woman and no matter where I go, I know that I don't look like a skydiver and it's not that people are trying to be cruel or mean or whatever, but you know, every time I go into a new drop zone, people, I might be physically carrying my parachute and like have my helmet in my hand and if I walk to the desk to, you know, do the paperwork or whatever, show someone my logbook, immediately someone will look up and be like, hey, you must be here for tandem. Walk right this way. Here's our tandem classroom and you know, that's not a unique experience, right? It's a common experience for other black skydiver, as well, just because we're such a small percentage of the skydiving community that and I guess race being so salient, especially in America, like when someone looks at me, they don't see skydiver, they see a customer. So like experience is like that, right? I was kind of curious like are other people having that in climbing or in, you know, BMX or in through hiking or like what is experience like for other people of color in different communities? And so in February 2016, I started the handle Melon and Basecamp after like thinking long and hard and not being able to come up with anything more clever, but it's okay. I like it now. I think it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Then in November of 2017, so just a little over a year ago, I started the website melonandbasecamp.com and at the time added 12 bloggers who are all across the US and in one of the countries. I think South Korea and then United Arab Emirates, we have one blogger as well. And the goal is to just focus on storytelling. Like let's tell our own stories. Let's not wait for other people to amplify our elevator on stories or deem them worthy. Let's get good and comfortable with being in our own skin and telling our own stories. And that was kind of like a big goal of mine. And it came from several things. One, yeah, that feeling of, you know, feeling like you're the only one and like how do you get beyond that? But also, yeah, it was a little bit of like sadness, right? Like I know I'm not the first black skydiver. Every time a new black skydiver is born, like we all feel like, oh, we're the only one, right? Or we're like doing something novel, but we're really not, right? Black people have been skydiving since the 1920s, including like parachute jumps into Harlem, right? That you don't hear about because there's no, there's no like written history. You have to like search out their textbooks and go to the African American History Museum. Like you really have to dig deep to find our history. And even the the skydiving group I run, Team Black Star skydivers, we are not the first black skydiving group, right? Though we are like a group of, you know, all different races and ethnicities, but we're not the first. But the fact that our history has not been recorded for me was just like really sad. Like I hate, I really hate duplicating effort and I hate starting over like that's kind of the downside of being, I guess, a minority in a community where your history isn't being told, right? Like you have to record your own history. No one's going to do it for you. So part of like Melon and Base Camp and Team Black Star and even now diversify at Doris is like, hey, let's tell our own stories. Let's keep track of our own history. So we're passing on a legacy, right? So other people don't ever have to feel like they're the only one. So whenever they get into this new activity, they can feel like, hey, I'm instantly connected to this bigger community. I have support. You know, I people who can mentor me. A lot of things which I didn't have, right? Like I do not have a mentor who looks like me because well, for one thing, currently there are no older and I use that term loosely, right? Because now I'm older. It's funny. I joke and I talk about how like when I first read Skydiving, like I didn't have any, you know, uh, female mentors and now I'm like, oh, I'm, I am like that older person who can mentor younger. Skydivers, right? I've like aged into that group. But even now, like I'd love to have an African-American female mentor who is in her 50s or 60s because that's really common in our community, right? This is a accessible sport. People do it well into their 80s and like I don't have that and it's not because no one has ever done it. It's just because our retention is really low in the sport and it's because maybe because there's not that support in there hasn't been that community or there's not the history, right? So I'm trying to like do my best to be able to contribute to all of these things, provide a place where people to tell their own stories, provide like a sense of continuity in history, you know, do some basic like record keeping, but also keep people excited about the sport and provide like support and encouragement that's been one like really exciting part of like the advocacy work that I do. Yeah. So when you're curating blog posts and going through submissions or working with writers for Melon and Bayes Camp, is there anything that you you look for in an essay that you receive? I think I look for like very personal storytelling because I think that's super compelling like not too preachy because again it's easy for people to be defensive and there are some people for whom even the word like diversity is a turn off, right? That's just part of our culture like in America, we're not really taught how to talk about registered, especially if it's something that doesn't really affect you or impact your own community, no skin in the game, it might be really kind of frustrating not to have the right language or comfort level to talk about race. And the same goes for gender, right? So I think really I appreciate stories that come from a very like personal level. I think it's really hard for people to be turned off by someone else just being incredibly vulnerable about their own story. I talked with Melon and Basecamp bloggers Nadia Mercado and Dr. Favia Dubick about why they choose to tell their stories on the site. Here's Nadia on why storytelling feels so important right now. Storytelling is so important. I think that storytelling, especially now in this political climate where people are alienated so much, I feel like storytelling gives a human aspect to what is going on in the world. I truly believe that storytelling can be used as a way to counteract the current political narrative. I think that's a big reason why I like to talk about myself and my experiences because I, as a woman of color, and with a mom that's an immigrant, have experienced the world in a certain way and I think that right now, you know, immigrants are made to believe quoting the president, they're calling immigrants literally illegal aliens like people who immigrate to this country are literally being dehumanized and through my storytelling, I feel like at least with my family and my experience, I'm able to give this humanity to it and this this personal ability to it that somebody else could read it and relate to it and be like, oh yes, like something about this story relates to me and they could empathize with it as well. So I feel like storytelling is so important and I love that melanin basecamp kind of does that, it allows not only the featured bloggers but other people to tell their stories, other adventure athletes to talk about their experiences or highlight other people in their experiences because there's a lot of interviews as well and we're starting to get into gear reviews as well. It's just so important right now because I feel like we need that, we need that storytelling in order to bring the humanity back to diverse and different people, you know. Yeah, and it's interesting to hear you say that because, you know, in reading your essay shut up and climb, you talk about how some of your kind of like quote unquote friends don't, like you say that you could trust them with your life but you wouldn't necessarily trust them with your story or they don't want to hear your story and when you talk about the importance of building empathy and understanding through sharing your story, it must be frustrating in those experiences where people just kind of want to have a fun, climbing experience and shut out, whatever else is going on in the world. Yes, it's very frustrating and I do feel like for a long time I internalized those experiences, you know, I would just go to the drop zone and, you know, we all want to be liked and we all want to have good experiences with people so I would just stay quiet and things would be say that we're pretty problematic and I would just stay quiet or I would go along with it, I would tokenize myself and I would do that so that we could continue on with the fun and, you know, keep the quote unquote good vibes going and in reality what I was doing was I was erasing myself and silencing myself and allowing other people to also just erase my experiences and silence my experiences and it's not okay. We shouldn't have to do that in order to survive. Through writing for a melanin-based camp, do you find yourself thinking about your outdoor experiences in a different way while you're in them, thinking about ways that you might share them with other people later through an essay or through a blog post? I believe so, I, you know, melanin-based camp and just blogging in general, it's almost like journaling, so I definitely, I, I'm trying to write down my experiences in a physical journal now, write down how I feel about it that way later on, you know, I'm able to kind of go back and put two and two together and find a way to write, write about it for melanin-based camp in a way that delivers a message. So yeah, I do think that melanin-based camp has helped, has kind of changed the way I view my experiences in the outdoors. A big project that I'm working on is writing about community gardening and how community gardening helps kind of, in its way, is a form of resistance of the current narrative of what food industry is and who eats healthy and who has access to healthy food. So that's kind of like my next project that's pretty big and that I feel really passionate about. So yeah, stay tuned. Uh, I went to Harvard for undergrad, Columbia for grad. Okay. Is that how you met Danielle through Harvard? Yeah. We were on the track team together. Oh, that's so cool. So you've known her a long time. Yeah. This is Dr. Fabia Dubick, a New Mexico climber and blogger for melanin-based camp. Fabia wrote about climbing through her cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery on the site. Oh, how would you describe Danielle? Well, she's extremely hardworking, diligent, but on the other hand, really kind and supportive because she's had her health issues, but she doesn't let that stop her from getting in and of her work done and her spirit always still seems to be high and, you know, when I'm not feeling well, she's really supportive of me in the hospital and things like that. So I can't, like she's one of the most supportive people I've ever met and I can say that she was like that even in college, that's like who she is. Hmm. Oh, it's so nice. It sounds like it based on everything that I've heard from everyone else I've talked to. What makes you want to become a part of melanin-based camp? Well, I like the idea that it wasn't just one sport or one race or just girls or just guys. It's all inclusive to like the whole outdoors for everyone. So I like that, you know, it's a nice platform for me to learn about other sports and how other people are doing things and like for the whole, like, you know, the whole world to see about, sorry, my dog, guys, break it up, cat dog fighting. It's a way for the whole world to kind of learn about the like outdoor sports and what people of color go through in that world. So overall, it's a nice balance. It's get to see trip reports, but you get to learn about, you know, different race issues or you get to see how to do new workouts. I mean, it's a website where you can learn just so much. Hmm. Yeah. Oh, that's really true. Have you been able to connect with people who you might not otherwise have connected with them by contributing to melanin based camp? Absolutely. Like a hundred percent that it was one of the best things I am just so grateful for Danielle for creating this because I now have this whole world of friends that I never would have had. And she hadn't created this site. I am visiting London in a couple of months. And because of her side, I, I hit up some people that I met through there. I'm like, Hey, I'm coming. And in April, I'm hosting someone she introduced me to a melanin based camp and she's coming here to New Mexico for us to go climbing. So I mean, this is a website that is really working at networking people from not just in the US, but the whole world. Oh, that's so cool because you always think about, you know, you think about the internet as being, you know, creating isolation versus creating connection. So it's been nice because now I still like wherever I travel, I kind of have friends. I can go almost anywhere and be like, Hey, I want to try surfing. Let me see who's on melanin based camp. You know, you have a very personal story that you shared on melanin based camp in three different parts about your non-hudge, Hodgkin's lymphoma and, and how it relates to climbing and how it's made you, probably in certain ways, a better climber. Why did you choose to share that story on melanin based camp? Well, Danielle and pretty much everybody who's on the site is very supportive. So I thought that it would be a good platform where I wouldn't, you know, like people would be nice. That would be welcoming to my story because Danielle attracts people. who have good hearts and things like that. I thought that it would be a very kind space to get my story out. The whole, everybody was very supportive and so I really appreciate her allowing me to get my story out in a nice safe space. Did you end up hearing from many people who work in remission for cancer? Yeah, I've heard from people who had cancer or other illnesses or people who had family members with cancer and just kind of how it's kind of helped them try to get to the gym or do whatever they kind of wanted to do and maybe they thought they didn't have the energy to do it or people who were just diagnosed with some big illness and they kind of thought their life was over and they're like oh, you know, maybe I can't get through this and kind of get back to a normal life. So Melna Basecamp is a place for telling personal stories and making real-life friends but it also has trip reports and gear reviews to better equip you for your next outing. Here's Danielle sharing about what's next for 2019. In 2019, another goal is to just really ask the community of people who read our articles and who follow us on social media. Hey, what do you guys want to hear about and one thing that people have responded with is they want to hear about like older adventures. They want to hear about like STEM-related articles, right? Like they want to hear about low waist and zero waist lifestyles and like how what can they do personally to be better stewards of the environment. So we're excited about like branching out a little bit more about staying relevant to our community and that's one great thing about like being an ethnic minority. Like a lot of our communities will definitely hold you accountable. That was for me like one of the biggest tensions I had when I started skydiving is a lot of other folks in my community being African-American don't necessarily care about skydiving, right? Like it's elitist. It's high cost not something you're interested in. You have to make content relevant to your community. Otherwise like what are you writing about? Like oh you have money to be able to do this. That's great. No one cares, right? So yeah so it's really like encouraged me to kind of embrace that tension to have a balance of trying to inspire people to try different things because that's always good but also you know writing about things and encouraging bloggers to write about things that are relevant to to everyone. We could sign off here but I can't help but share one last sentiment Nadia had about Danielle. See Danielle had told me that she didn't want the entire focus of the episode to be on her that she's told her story enough. Here's what Nadia had to say about that. I feel like she's so low key and it's just like her to sit there and say oh I'm tired of talking about myself. Let's uplift other people but in reality Danielle really is the star of the show. She is so brilliant and incredibly kind and she is one of the strongest most resilient people that I know and part of the reason why I love writing for melanin base camp and I love being a part of this is because I know that I'm there for my friend and I'm helping uplift her vision and I'm so invested in it because I know that melanin base camp is there for the right reasons and I know what motivates her to do it. So yeah she's just one of the most incredible inspiring people that I know I hate using inspiring but she truly does inspire me to be a better person and she motivates me to be a better athlete and a better nurse so yeah that's how I will about Danielle. I definitely tear it up here and you talk about her. Yeah that's my girl. head to www.melaninbasecamp.com to learn more and give them a follow @melaninbasecamp on social media I'll list all the links in the show notes as well as the personal handles of Nadia and Fabia. Thank you to Danielle for going above and beyond and talking with me about melanin base camp diversify outdoors and Teresa Baker's outdoor CEO diversity pledge. To learn more about the pledge make sure to listen to a special bonus episode that was released today from Danielle and Teresa. Thank you to our sponsor Thurth Love. Head to www.thurthLove.com/explore for 15% off your first purchase. The best way to stay touch is to join our She Explores podcast Facebook group. It's where listeners can connect and chat about episodes give each other gear and trip advice and keep the conversation going from episodes. And if you enjoy listening to this show please take the time to review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen because it helps other people find us. And another way to do that is to simply share the episode with a friend. And if you do it on social media we're on Instagram Facebook and Twitter so make sure to tag us so we'll see it. That's @she_explores on Instagram. And if you enjoyed this episode of She Explores I know you'll enjoy our sister show Women on the Road. It's all about life on the road from the feminine perspective. Last week we actually reshared an old episode of She Explores I went on the road called Creatives on the Road featuring Allison Turner and Amanda Sandlin. We took a little bit of time and re-edited it so it's a better listening experience than it originally was. It was really cool to go back and listen because I can tell that I've learned a lot about podcasting in that time but that some things have remained the same. Which is also nice. Music is by Evan Schafer, Nihilor, Lee Roosevelt, Meis and Kay Angle using a Creative Commons attributions license. Until next time have fun out there.