Filling Gaps in the Research: CxG Program Alum Rachel Garcia Reflects on Designing Accessible Focus Groups

Rachel Garcia grew up in Alaska, moving between Fairbanks, villages around Lake Iliamna, Dutch Harbor, and Eagle River. She remembers thinking about racial equity from a young age. “As a teenager it was something I noticed,” she recalls. “I noticed inequality going on and felt upset about it but also felt like, I don’t know what to do about that. I continuously found myself in largely white spaces and wondered, why are there no people of color here?”

Rachel began doing outdoor recreation research in 2016 and started to notice the demographics of people who filled out surveys. “It was also disproportionately white,” she recalled. “This is a concern for me because our research is mostly used to make land management planning decisions. So I was sitting there thinking, huh, if the data they’re getting is coming only from a restricted part of the public, then the decisions they make wouldn’t be based on what everybody wants or at least what a wider range of people want.”

The focus on gathering that wider range of input gradually became a larger part of Rachel's work. She signed up for conferences and gatherings about outdoor equity, and when she came across the Forum’s Conversations Across Generations (CxG) program in 2021, she shared about the pilot research project she was planning in her application. “I knew that I was headed into this research project,” she remembers, “and I was looking for extra support, and some ways to become educated and exercise my muscles of being able to talk about race and getting more comfortable with it. When I ran across CxG I thought this is great, this is exactly what I wanted. This is a thing I can do.”

Once the program began, Rachel remembers, the experience was intense. “I have memories from the first couple of sessions of being very self-conscious and stressed out. And afraid of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, being inappropriate in some way. I had a lot of anxiety about being in that space and talking about race.”

“I have memories from the first couple of sessions of being very self-conscious and stressed out. And afraid of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, being inappropriate in some way. I had a lot of anxiety about being in that space and talking about race.”

Over the eight weeks of CxG, Rachel's cohort met weekly on Zoom. “It was so much better than a conference because it was really interactive,” she said. The goal of the program was for her cohort to discover a sense of radical belonging - belonging that rests on the deep appreciation of different experiences and perspectives rather than common interests and shared identities. Participants were pushed to replace the questions “How can we find common ground?” and “How can our community overcome differences?” with the questions “How can we better understand our differences?” and “How can our community leverage differences?”

“I’m so glad I had those experiences because it really helped me work through that anxiety and get to a better place where I started to feel more comfortable,” says Rachel. “And now I feel quite comfortable and I’m ok with the anxiety coming back, and it does, because it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve done the wrong thing or I’m failing. It means it’s part of the experience. It’s OK to have moments of self-consciousness or anxiety and you can still be a part of this work even with those things.”

Rachel, whose grandfather was Mexican, identifies as a white person. “That’s how I grew up thinking about myself and it’s only been recently that I’ve gotten interested in the heritage that got a little dropped,” she says. “My grandfather’s first language was Spanish but he didn’t speak it with his children. I see a lot of the anxiety in other white people about approaching race and racial topics and when I have the chance I try to let people know that lesson about, it’s OK to have that anxiety. It’s OK to make mistakes. And just because you’re a white person it doesn’t mean you don’t belong in spaces where people are talking about race.”

Rachel's pilot research project, hosted by UAF and YWCA Alaska, was titled “BIPOC* Ways of Being on the Land & Outdoor Recreation Focus Groups" *Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Adults who identified as Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Islander joined facilitated in-person focus groups in Anchorage and Fairbanks to share about their experiences with the outdoors and public lands. Rachel and her team have been analyzing the results from 49 participants and are preparing to share them this spring, both publicly and directly with public land agencies to encourage investment in “diverse outdoor activities and to support the ability of people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to safely and comfortably be in outdoor spaces.”

“I wanted to contribute to filling a gap in the research: more representation of People of Color in outdoor recreation research,” says Rachel. “There is definitely research happening, but when you look at the surveys public land managers give, they are usually happening on those public lands, on sites like a trailhead. Because the participation is disproportionate in this country, the voices they hear on those surveys are not representative of the whole US public.” Rachel also envisions that the results will serve people who work in outdoor fields, ranging from public land managers to commercial gear shops to nonprofits. “I’m hoping if they’re in that space in any way and want to be organizing events or selling products or making plans for future campgrounds or trailheads or whatever, now they will have more info about what our community members are experiencing. And maybe some of it will sound familiar and some if it will sound a little bit new.”

Rachel also asked the Forum to do a training with the focus group facilitators, which she credits with helping to enhance their skills at building welcoming spaces and getting comfortable with silence in conversations. The focus group questions, chosen by 17 committee members, also included a question from the Forum’s On the Land project, “What is outside to you?”, and each group utilized conversation guidelines, inspired by the Forum’s four agreements. “This was a great way to start the conversations,” she recalls.

There are a lot of ways CxG continues to affect Rachel's work and beyond. “I feel very grateful to have these people in my life,” she says of her fellow cohort members. “And they are still in my life. Those relationships I have now - I know these people, I’ve been able to see some of them in person and even work with them… It’s fun to think back through how this all affected - well, I was going to say how it affected the project, but really it affected my life.”

The results of Rachel's study will be published online by UAF in 2025.