COLUMN: Love for the Outdoors is a Gift that Pays Forward

By Ben Jealous When we see a 75-year-old white man out in the woods with a group of Black and brown kids from low-income neighborhoods, teaching them about nature, few of us assume he is there because that is where he feels most comfortable.& Probably even fewer of us assume many of those kids look just like the ones he grew up with in public housing projects more than 60 years ago.& Rocky Milburn grew up as one of the few white kids in a mostly Black public housing development in southern Indiana. His family was very poor. They were still poor when they moved into an old farmhouse in the country. That was where Rocky fell in love with the outdoors. Even though his parents struggled financially — perhaps even worse than when they lived in the projects — Rocky did not care. “We lived right across the street from a creek,” Rocky pronounces it “crick,” “and I spent my days running the fields. You can kind of say it was my drug at the time.”& For more than 25 years, Rocky has been an Outings Leader with the Sierra Club’s Inspiring Connections Outdoors (ICO) program in Tampa, Florida....