Misson
and Values
Empowering environmental stewards
Out Our Front Door welcomes you to join us on our immersive, inclusive, and educational bike camping adventures. We aim to deepen your reverence for the region by exploring local trails while learning about the culture, history, and habitats native to the beautiful Lake Michigan area and beyond.
Welcoming, adventurous volunteers that educate
Our values shape everything we do—welcoming all riders, embracing adventure, fostering a strong volunteer community, and deepening our connection to local landscapes through education.
Foundational to who are and always will be. Everyone, and we mean everyone, is welcome to roll with us. We have a spirit of radical inclusivity and strive towards greater diversity in our organization and our participants.
We are a community of bike riders that warmly support and encourage each other and everyone that rides with us regardless of what they, their bike, or their gear looks like. We operate with a genuine open spirit and kindness.
This is how and why we began. We believe in adventure. Read that vision statement. Ya see? We embrace all adventures and strive to help folks realize that they don’t need to go to a far off place to have an adventure as adventure is always waiting right out their front door.
Wrapped up in this adventure spirit is an embrace of type 2 fun, exploration, and knowing that often those rough moments of a journey make for the best stories and forge the deepest connections. Our curiosity about our home pulls us outdoors. Wrapped up in this adventure is usually a bit of celebration and a party.
As a mainly volunteer run organization, we believe in developing our volunteers and creating a culture that fosters growth for everyone involved while also remaining sustainable in our rides and as an organization. We collaborate with all sorts of organizations and companies to partner in stewardship of the habitats and trails we so happily pedal along.
We understand that our mission hits home the strongest with those that voluntarily become a part of OOFD and give big and small parts of themselves to make it the outstanding org that it is. Our volunteers are a huge part of the heartbeat of Chicago’s adventure and bike camping community. We gush with gratitude for all that give their time and brilliance to make OOFD such a rad place.
We have a deep appreciation, curiosity and reverence for our home. Some may even call it topophilia. We are a hyper local organization that strives to be more thoughtful and connected to the places we visit. We desire to share our knowledge and gratitude for our homeland with you while also learning from you. Together we can deepen our reverence for our home, its stories, our stories, and all of our neighbors from the ant to the oak tree.
We educate because we want you to gain the skills to sustainably adventure on your own, and we want you to get so stoked about our native habitats that, like us, you start to share this knowledge with others. And ideally you go so far as to put efforts into conserving and restoring our native habitats by volunteering with us and/or the heaps of local orgs that care for these ecosystems.
We believe in adventure.
Adventure is a gateway to deeper connections—with ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes around us. Out Our Front Door inspires people to explore the magic in their own backyard, fostering appreciation for local history, nature, and the stories that shape our world. By embracing adventure close to home, we cultivate a spirit of curiosity, conservation, and shared experiences that last a lifetime.
