The Virginia’s Outdoors Foundation aims to ensure that all Virginians have access to safe open spaces which leads to better health and a higher quality of life. This initiative particularly focuses on communities that have been inadequately served, overlooked, or marginalized due to factors such as race, ethnicity, income, or other discriminators, which have historically restricted their access to land and open space for recreation, education, and other uses.
The Get Outdoors (GO) program by the Virginia’s Outdoors Foundation provides grants specifically aimed at increasing equitable access to safe open spaces within Virginia’s communities. The program supports a range of expenses including planning, capacity building, and infrastructure development to create or improve open space access. The GO fund is designed to be a flexible and adaptable resource for communities, particularly focusing on efforts that serve underserved communities. Projects that are successful in the pre-application phase, which align closely with the program's goals of increasing open spaces in underserved areas, are invited to submit a final application. Critical to this application process is the demonstration of how the project will benefit communities that have been inadequately served, overlooked, or marginalized, with support from local community organizations and leaders enhancing the application.