Blackwaters

Please consider donating to Love is King @lik_free2roam - Blackwaters team of participants engaged through the Love is King program named Operation Roam (Rapid Ongoing Advance Missions). The mission is to provide an opportunity for BIPOC individuals (21 and over) to build outdoor leadership and advocate for public land and freshwater conservation. Historically, BIPOC voices were not invited into government, congressional, or decision-making spaces regarding wildlife and indigenous policies, recreation, permitting, land management, and advocacy in the outdoors. Support us Love is King; continue to do this important work. Blackwaters encompasses the power of five Black men whose paths have been challenged with loss, defeat, fear, and pain by life’s ups and downs and the social injustice that Black men and Black boys face daily. They have fallen into an “endangered species,” only surviving daily. Through surviving life’s trials, each man has found grace and success in the outdoors, healed and mended by nature’s medicine to the soul, embracing the art of fly fishing and building brotherhood. Blackwater is an expedition, a journey in the Gates Of The Arctic Circle National Park, adventure, a vision quest, and a fly fishing adventure that surpasses the color of their skin, connecting to the fundamentals of nature, the poetry of life, and prosperous joy. Like indigenous communities, they find self-fulfillment in being outdoors. They find their representation and hold space for everyone, especially inspiring young Black boys. It is a dual survival between black boys who can not make the connection to a black man in the outdoors due to lack of representation and black men finding representation in wild spaces to call their own. Hopefully, these youths can see themselves and be inspired to embark on their journeys into the outdoors. The concept is a tactically crafted story in dialogue and adventure, emphasizing dismantling the fear of BIPOC and inspiring BIPOC to pursue their journey outdoors and uplift black boys’ lives in green spaces.