Katty Regalado joins the Sierra Club Outdoors team as the Chicago Inspiring Connections Outdoors Coordinator. She'll facilitate activities that connect Chicago youth to nature through outdoor activities, experiential education and advocacy. We are super excited to have Katty on the team. Please join us in gratitude.
Katty values the real life place-making that shapes people’s sense of home, identity, and relationship to nature and community at large. Her approach in working with children, youth, and families is informed by this knowledge base to create meaningful experiences in outdoor exploration and agency for action and healing.
She has designed & facilitated curricula, coordinated youth programming and inter-generational monarch conservation projects, organized with congregational Green Teams, led groups in exploring local and nearby nature, created native habitat gardens and Urban Ag projects, as well as support youth development practitioners in integrating a green lens to their programming. An advocate for a more just and resilient future, she is inspired by the opportunities in our connection to the outdoors that can activate community wellness & holistic youth empowerment.
First generation to the Great Lakes -Chicago homegrown, Katty’s passion was steadily ignited as a child by walks at local parks with her grandmother where they would forage medicinal plants, spending time at the lakefront, and summers visiting Indiana Dunes. Exploring her ancestral home of Peru and getting to know more intimately the prairies and wetlands of the Midwest through the lens of indigenous peoples traditional ecological knowledge motivated her to engage in the need for inspiring re-connection to our relationship with the land and each other.
Katty has an M.A. in Environmental Education from Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College & B.A. in Latin American & Latino Studies from University of Illinois at Chicago.