Deshawn Mayfield gazes across the vast view from Spy Rock. Though he’s only a couple hours from home, he feels worlds away from his rundown neighborhood on the East End of inner-city Richmond. The seventh grader, who comes from a low-income household, had never before been given the opportunity to hike in the mountains.

“When we first went out there, everyone was complaining how steep it was, but we got on top of the mountain,” he recalls. “It felt good to make it to the top.”

Mayfield is one of a number of kids that have been venturing out into the Blue Ridge backcountry and exploring the world of adventure sports, thanks to grassroots groups like the Blue Sky Fund. The Richmond-based organization formed last year to help low-income urban teens get out of the metro rut and discover the beauty of the outdoors. Blue Sky Fund focuses primarily on Richmond City Public School students living in under-resourced neighborhoods and homes.

It all started with the gritty determination of 27-year-old Lawson Wijesooriya, an inner city teacher who decided to combine her love of the outdoors with her passion for helping underprivileged kids. Although she grew up in a safe New Jersey suburb, she was drawn to the city as a teacher. She helped form the Blue Sky Fund and runs the program virtually by herself. She lives in the same low-income neighborhood of Richmond’s East End. Organizing her first trip consisted of going door to door and inviting kids from her streets to go backpacking-which was not an easy sell initially.

But with her persistence, last fall she convinced a group of seven inner city kids, including Mayfield, to head out for an overnight backpacking trip in some of Central Virginia’s most rugged and scenic terrain.

“I fell in love with the spirituality of nature at a young age,” she says. “I’ve learned how much of an equalizing common denominator that outdoor activities can be. There’s something about that leveling of the playing field that made sense when trying to incorporate my passion for the inner city. Some of these kids have never even been down to the James River, which runs through our city, and that’s a tragedy to me.”

As the program continues to grow, Wijesooriya works hard just to get some of the kids to show up. She deals with obstacles like phones being disconnected and transportation not being available. Last month she borrowed her friend’s SUV to pick the kids up one by one and get them to an outing at a local climbing gym.

“Getting kids outdoors excites them in a way that they are not receiving in formal education,” she says “It gets them away from our video game, chip-eating culture. The lack of access is the number one issue in low-income communities. When people can’t pay their heating bills, they’re not going to be able to go pay to rock climb. ”

Wijesooriya’s work could help change the ethnic landscape of a largely white, cost-prohibitive outdoor world. Her seven kids were the only black faces in the climbing gym last month. Multiculturalism is vastly underrepresented in mountain sports.

The first youth outdoor programs actually started 35 years ago with the Sierra Club. Since 1971, the Sierra Club has been leading the Inner City Outings Program in cities across the country, including Atlanta, Washington, D.C, and Raleigh. Thousands of children have gained wilderness experiences-as well as self-esteem and interpersonal skills-through Inner City Outings, and it has become a model for emerging new programs, like the Outdoor Industry Foundation’s Teens Outside! Program.

Teens Outside! in Asheville, N.C., last spring introduced 50 kids to climbing, mountain biking, and kayaking; 70 percent of them were African American. Local businesses donated gear and local mentors from colleges donated their time. The Outdoor Industry Foundation is developing 20 additional Teens Outside! programs across the country this year, including new programs in Charlotte, N.C., Radford, Va., and Frostburg, Md.

“Our vision is that outdoor recreation programming will be a core part of all city parks and recreation departments,” says Alison Steimke of the Outdoor Industry Foundation. “It’s a natural solution to inactivity and helping kids become healthy.”

Once kids get a taste of the wild, they just might find a new passion for life. Mayfield is already looking forward to his next backpacking trip.

“Being away from home was an adventure,” he says. “I learned that I was a lot stronger than I thought I was.”

-Jedd Ferris

Go Outside and Play:

Find out more information about the organizations taking inner city kids into the outdoors.

Blue Sky Fund: www.blueskyfund.org

Inner City Outings: www.sierraclub.org/ico

Teens Outside: www.outdoorindustryfoundation.org