South Carolina State Parks Director Paul McCormack has visited many campgrounds for years, and one thing he keeps noticing is the lack of diversity. He has been working as a park ranger for 27 years.
“If you drive through our campgrounds, it’s very much a Caucasian population that has grown up camping,” McCormack said. “It’s generational. It’s kids and grandkids camping, coming back year after year. But you don’t see a lot of African Americans or a diverse population camping. It’s certainly not representative of our state’s population.”
According to a report, McCormack met the founder of a group known as Black Folks Camp Too a few years ago.
“We worked with them to put on events and promote campgrounds and try to encourage different user groups to come out and experience camping,” McCormack said. “We’re trying to address the reasons they don’t camp. Historically, they didn’t grow up camping, so it’s not an activity that they have in their wheelhouse, where, as a child, their parents took them camping, and when they became adults, they wanted to go do it.”
South Carolina State Parks has been working on reaching out to diverse categories of people who do not frequently visit the parks, McCormack said
“We’ve been trying to expose them to some of the opportunities we have in parks,” he said. “One of the areas we identified well over a year ago is our camping. We don’t have a lot of diversity in our campgrounds. Specifically, we don’t have a lot of African Americans using it.”
There will be a new event at the state parks, such as Lake Greenwood State Park, every month this year.
“We’ve had diversity issues in our parks for years, so it’s not a new issue that we are thinking about,” McCormick said. “We’ve done recruiting, trying to change our workforce, and we’ve put on programs that specifically tried to target underserved communities.”
A couple of weeks ago, the park’s staff organized an overnight program for campers who had never visited Chester State Park. The first-time campers were members of the North and South Carolina chapters of Outdoor Afro. Over 30 campers learned to set up tents, were introduced to the background of Chester State Park, and played disc golf. They were also taught how to set up a campfire and cook over it.
Outdoor Afro is a network that celebrates and motivates Black connections and leadership in nature. According to its website, it is a non-profit organization with leadership networks across the nation. It connects people with nature-based experiences, the website states.
