The Woman of Color Transforming Access and Leadership in Outdoor Travel
Photo Caption: Breanne Acio co-founded Sekr, a platform making outdoor camping more accessible and diverse.
Skift Take
As a queer woman of color in the U.S. outdoor and tech space, Breanne Acio and her Sēkr app are making outdoor recreation more accessible through a community-driven listing of free campsites, plus a social platform. But she’s also aiming to end the "bro culture" in the outdoor travel industry.
When Breanne Acio and her wife decided to pause international travel to know the U.S. better, they converted a parent’s empty cargo van into a campervan that they could live in while on the road.
It was the summer of 2017.
“We took off for the first time and as teachers, we invested a lot into this little house, and we have this vision of us camping on the beach and the stars,” said Acio. “That happened, but the reality was that most of the time we were ending up in WalMart parking lots, or crappy roadside pull outs. Finding places to stay was way harder than we thought it was going to be.”
Then came the loneliness on the road. Although the couple had each other, they felt a need for community to go with the van life.
It’s this double realization that led Acio to co-found Sēkr, the largest database of over 50,000 free campsites in the U.S. and a crowdsourced mobile app that aims to make outdoor travel easier, but also more inclusive.
“Our whole mission is to make the outdoors more accessible to more people,” said Acio, who is of Filipino descent and Jewish heritage, and describes herself as “super mixed." Growing up in Thousand Oaks, north of Los Angeles, Acio was also the first to get a college degree in her family.
Sēkr now has 18 team members globally, including 10 full-time employees in the U.S. who are all remote, and four of the latter are van life nomads.
Just this month, Sēkr announced the close of $2.25 million in seed funding, backed in part by Storyteller Overland and Go Fund Me’s co-founder Andy Ballester. Acio is now focused on creating an online reservation system and digitizing the tens of thousands of campsites to put the van life within reach of more Americans. The funding will also help Sēkr to ra
