Help Us Keep Black Girls Camping Trip Running

Black Girls Camping Trip is a community safe space that supports black women and non-binary people to reconnect with nature and intentional rest through camping retreats, online events, an authentic rest webseries, podcast and community magazine.

We use the serenity of the outdoors to isolate our communities from everyday stressors so that they have time to psychologically and emotionally rest amongst people who understand them and their needs.

Planning a mental health retreat during 2021 with limited services and constantly changing government guidelines has deeply impacted our outdoors programming. From extra precautions to test all campers upon arrival to having equipment stuck in EU countries, an incredible amount of work and resources had to be poured into delivering our event to the best standard possible. These uncertain times meant that we were working hard with no security that our work would come to fruition, and we take our responsibility as community workers incredibly seriously where Black women and non-binary people’s mental health is concerned.

Especially following a global pandemic and the absolutely draining year that it has been for race relations in 2020/1.

Yet still, we were incredibly proud to have been able to deliver our camping trip in August and offer a refuge to so many in our community, however, this was at a great loss to our overall health as a team and the drive and resources that had kept us going for so long.

We are a team of 11 volunteers, who all have personal stories that lead us to be concerned about the mental health of members in our communities. We work tirelessly to deliver our services and tackle the collective lack of access to the outdoors, alongside our full time jobs and studies.

As a result of limited capacity funding for Black community spaces in general, we have had to cancel our plans for a 2022 trip but we hope that this isn’t the end for BGCT. We need your help to cover our running costs, support our volunteer staff and to develop our site so that we can continue the essential work that we do.

Outside of our projects within our immediate community (Black women and non-binary people), we also deliver an annual social action project that caters to direct poverty-related needs. In 2019, this was tackling period poverty by delivering over 900 sanitary products to food banks and in 2021 we raised funds to deliver 300+ stationery resources to low income families.

Black Girls Camping Trip is your organisation as much as it is ours and now we need your help.

This past year has been an incredibly hard year for the team but with £12,000 we will be able to:

• cover maintenance costs for the organisation so that plans for a camping trip in 2023 can resume
• continue our work as a team over the next year in building more community events and safe spaces
• launch our LifeLine podcast, a podcast in collaboration with Black mental health professionals to provide education about mental health disorders, health rights and diagnoses
• kick off production on our web series