Hello, my name is Jeimy Lainez Valencia, I am a junior sociology major and economics minor. This semester I am a Community Fellow with the Blue Mountain Land Trust. Right now BMLT and I are working on a significant project. We are trying to connect with the town around Walla Walla and trying to get their opinions on outdoor activities and the outdoors in general. Although our main goal is to reach the Latino community since we are targeting elementary schools and middle schools that have not only Hispanic kids but a mix of different races we are making sure we don’t single out any certain group. Right now we are in the process of being able to get in touch with schools and different programs. For example, I have contacted Sharpstein, Garrison Middle School, and the Juvenile Justice Center farming program. I have been connecting with them to ask if I can have a session or two with talks and ask them a couple of questions about their experiences with the outdoors. This would potentially be in a focus group kind of style. We plan to be able to get information on a lot of the youth’s background in outdoor activities. We plan to use that and get more information on what the Blue Mountain Land Trust can do to make better accessibility for communities like the Latino community. We plan to start with something small we want to create an activity for families and kids that they will choose and we hope to do this in the springtime when it is a little nicer weather, in which kids can get exposed to new experiences and be more inclined to maybe do it again with family. Right now we are still in the process of reaching out to schools and different programs so we can get in touch with kids, we are sending emails to the school district and different organizations to hopefully get consent from them and also find the best way to be able to speak with theses kids in a nonharmful way since we are working primarily with youth. We haven’t been able to go to any of the schools yet we are just in the process but we hope to very soon after want to share these kids’ opinions we are thinking of ethical storytelling as a way to research it, and we also will use it to plan our big activities. We are thinking of doing one main activity for each of the groups that reach out, we plan to make it near which is the accessibility part of this project. Some of the challenges that have come up are people not getting back to me which is a setback for me since I can’t do anything until they get back to me. Sorry for the boring picture but a lot of what I have been doing is email and research to better prepare for my project.