As the Free to Play fund launches across Canada, communities have an extraordinary opportunity—and responsibility—to rethink who outdoor play is truly for. This moment calls us not only to expand play, but to deepen our commitment to equity within it.

I write from the position of a white, settler, cisgender queer woman who grew up in poverty and now moves through the world as a middle-class, educated adult. My early experiences of play were shaped as much by freedom and roaming on the Land as by instability, trauma, and social housing. These personal histories—of class shifts, identity, safety, and relationship to Land—continue to shape how I understand outdoor play, who it includes, and who it leaves out. They guide my commitment to naming inequity clearly and working toward forms of outdoor play and play-based learning that do not unintentionally reproduce harm, but instead move us toward justice.

For decades, many educators and advocates have celebrated the outdoors as “the great equalizer”—imagining children stepping outside classroom walls into a world where everyone has equal room to run, imagine, explore, and flourish.

And yet, research, practice, and community experience increasingly show that outdoor play and play-based learning do not automatically create equity. In fact, they often amplify existing inequalities.

Nature does not erase structural barriers. It reveals them.

Outdoor environments act as mirrors, reflecting the social, political, and historical forces that shape children’s lives (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). Those reflections can be uncomfortable, but they show us where meaningful change is required.

How Inequality Gets Amplified Outdoors

1. Access: Who Can Get There, Stay There, and Belong There

Outdoor play relies on access to green space, clothing, gear, transportation, and time. For families facing financial precarity, inflexible work schedules, unsafe neighbourhoods, or limited transportation, outdoor programs become inaccessible long before the learning even begins.

2. Safety: The Outdoors Isn’t Neutral

Indigenous, Black, and racialized children often experience disproportionate surveillance, stereotyping, or assumptions of risk in outdoor public spaces. Research with African Nova Scotian communities shows that racialized children’s outdoor play is often constrained by fears of over-policing and scrutiny (Hamilton-Hinch et al., 2023; Nature Canada, 2024), shaping their sense of belonging, safety, and freedom.

3. Ability: When the Landscape Itself Excludes

Uneven ground, inaccessible washrooms, steep trails, and limited adaptive equipment can exclude children with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. Without intentional design—including accessible routes, adaptive tools, and sensory-friendly planning—the natural environment becomes a barrier rather than a teacher or a source of healing.

4. History: Land Holds Memories and Stories

Land carries stories—of belonging, teachings, cultural identity, and nourishment. Indigenous scholars such as Redvers remind us that Land is a living relative, holding both generational knowledge and the impacts of colonial disruption (Redvers, n.d.). For many families, outdoor learning evokes healing or harm depending on their histories and experiences of displacement, exclusion, or cultural connection (Simpson, 2014).

The Myth of the Equalizing Outdoors

The idea that nature itself levels the playing field is compelling—but untrue. Without equitable systems surrounding it, outdoor play can widen participation gaps, reinforce racial, cultural, ability-based, and class-based inequities, privilege children with more resources, and obscure the needs of those who have been historically marginalized.

This is not a failure of children, families, or educators—it is a reflection of deeply unequal systems. Outdoor play simply makes these inequalities harder to ignore.

Equity Must Be Designed, Not Assumed

Outdoor play becomes a site of equity only when adults intentionally build the conditions for it. Equity shows up when:

• Programs remove access barriers, including transportation, cost, and gear.
  
  

• Design honours diverse bodies, cultural identities, and sensory needs.
  
  

• Educators collaborate meaningfully with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples where appropriate and guided by local Nations, centering relationships and reciprocity (Restoule, n.d.).
  
  

• Programs are co-created with families and community partners rather than designed for them.
  
  

• Outdoor play is embedded within the systems children rely on—licensed childcare, schools, and neighbourhood green spaces—so access is not dependent on privilege or geography. (I have been writing and thinking so much about this lately in my work). 
  
  

• Safety is redefined—especially for those most frequently scrutinized outdoors (Hamilton-Hinch et al., 2023).
  
  

Without intentionality, outdoor play recreates the inequities of the systems around it. With intentionality, it becomes a place where justice can grow.

Designing Equity Into Practice

Recognizing how inequality is amplified in outdoor play does not diminish its transformative potential; it deepens our responsibility to steward these spaces differently. Outdoor environments hold tremendous possibilities—for healing, for nurturing curiosity and confidence, for strengthening cultural connections, for building relationships, and for inspiring imaginative exploration. But these possibilities can only be realized when we intentionally extend them to the children who have historically been excluded.

Equity requires a non-assumptive stance—approaching children, families, and communities with curiosity rather than conclusion.

It requires redistributing power through co-creation, where communities shape programs from the start and where trust-building is understood as essential work.

It also requires resourcing differently: prioritizing funds for transportation, gear, food, and staffing that reduce barriers, and directing resources based on community-defined priorities rather than institutional convenience.

When programs honour diverse bodies, cultures, and sensory needs—and when educators collaborate meaningfully with local Nations—outdoor play becomes grounded in relationship rather than assumption. Equity becomes embedded within the places children already rely on, rather than existing only in special programs accessible to a privileged few.

When adults shift how they show up, how they share power, and how they invest in relationships and resources, outdoor play becomes more than an activity. It becomes a site of possibility—one where safety is redefined, dignity is protected, and children, caregivers, and practitioners experience joy, belonging, and freedom together.

Coming Next: Introducing Play Security

To move from intention to action, we need systemic approaches that ensure every child—not just some—has safe, equitable, and meaningful access to outdoor play and Land-based learning. In my master’s thesis, I introduced the concept of play insecurity to describe how inadequate or inequitable access to play arises from sociocultural and systemic barriers, much like housing or food insecurity (Power, 2024).

Playful Mindset is now developing a Play Security Initiative—an effort aimed at advancing systems change so equitable play becomes possible for all children.

Play Security helps us look beyond individual moments of play and toward the broader conditions, relationships, and systems that determine whether children experience genuine freedom, agency, and belonging.

Understanding and designing for Play Security is essential for systems change: it illuminates how broader determinants either enable children to thrive or silently restrict their right to play. By focusing on these structural conditions, we begin to imagine what it truly takes to transform amplified inequity into collective possibility.

References

Hamilton-Hinch, B., Watson, E., Stirling Cameron, A., Hickens, A., Pimentel, J., & McIsaac, J. (2023). Early childhood leisure experiences of African Nova Scotian children: The privilege of risky outdoor play. Leisure/Loisir.

Nature Canada. (2024). Race and nature in the city. Nature Canada.

Power, M. (2024). Playing with Play: Considerations for Embedding Outdoor Play-Based Learning into the Early Years (Master’s thesis, Trent University).

Redvers, N. (n.d.). Indigenous community & planetary health research lab. Western University.

Restoule, J.-P. (n.d.). Researcher profile. University of Victoria.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25.

Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. Routledge.

*Thank you to Montreal-based artist and illustrator, Todd Stewart for this incredible artwork.