In The Beginning

In the Spring of 1996, Brian Houser and Dana Lomma discovered they were on the same path in seeking a way to provide outdoor experiences for children who had no access to nature.  Individually, they researched and found that national Sierra Club had an established program called Inner City Outings and provided the backbone essentials for starting a local youth group. These two young visionaries met for the first time at a Sierra Club Governor Pinchot Group meeting in early 1996. They joined forces to fulfill their combined vision and completed the paperwork needed to add a new group in Harrisburg to the National ICO program.

By June of 1996, they were joined by Sierra Club GVP members Brook Lenker, Pat Reilly and Deborah Rudy. HICO's first participant group came from a community outreach summer program formed by members of downtown Harrisburg's Messiah Lutheran Church. Other youth organizations that HICO was fortunate to partner with in the early years were Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region, Boys and Girls Club of Harrisburg, Kingdom Embassy, Allison Hill Christ Lutheran Church, John Hall Group, and Marshall Elementary School.

Since its founding by two teachers working in inner city schools in Oakland, California in the 1970's and subsequent envelopment into the national Sierra Club's Outing Program, the ICO initials stood for Inner City Outings. In 2014, Sierra Club changed the words that the ICO initials stand for to incorporate a wider participant audience under the national program's Outings umbrella. ICO now stands for Inspiring Connections Outdoors.

Two decades later, Harrisburg ICO is still fulfilling its original vision of providing urban youth with environmentally focused outdoor outings and events. Some of the most memorable early outings included digging clay to make pottery which was fired over individually collected, dried cow dung; camping and swimming along the crystal clear Loyalsock Creek; building a Bayscape garden in the courtyard of a housing project where our first participants lived; picking apples and planting Christmas trees at a tree farm; learning to fish in nearby creeks and rivers; fossil hunting at a local cliff, and floating seven miles down the Susquehanna River from Clarks Ferry back to Harrisburg.

1996-2016 marked the twentieth year for Harrisburg ICO. A former youth agency representative noted that, " I enjoyed many adventures with Harrisburg ICO. Thanks to them, I was able to help provide many, many, inner city children with experiences to last a lifetime! Those youth are now adults with families of their own and are still sharing the knowledge gained on those outings."

In 2016, the Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter interviewed Deborah Rudy, who has remained active in HICO since its beginning in 1996. Read about what inspired her to volunteer locally, regionally and nationally for ICO, including winning a national Sierra Club award for Communications, helping create the National Sierra Club Madeline Pyatt Award for volunteers, serving as National Chair of ICO, and dedicating more than twenty-one years to getting children outside here.

Pat Reilly, another original HICO leader, was awarded the Governor Pinchot Group Supernova Award in August 2016. He was profiled in the national Sierra Club 'Planet' in 2015. Read about his thirty years of environmental activism and his Harrisburg ICO accomplishments here.