No replies to this topic

[Aaron]

This week over 60 youth, most from distressed inner city neighborhoods across the United States, will convene for the Groundwork USA Youth Summit hosted by Groundwork Denver and the National Park Service at Rocky Mountain National Park. While most of these high-school aged ambassadors come from communities struggling with the challenges of high unemployment rates, gang-related violence, and failing schools, this event will allow the youth to explore and talk about something different, and something important to them: environmental stewardship, National Parks, and the future of public lands.

Participating youth are members of Groundwork Green Teams operating in economically and environmentally distressed neighborhoods of communities like Lawrence, Massachusetts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Richmond, California, and Denver. The Green Team program is a youth development and employment model that engages low-income young people in building their environmental awareness and leadership skills, along with preparing them for a variety of green careers from urban planning and environmental engineering to public health, green landscaping, environmental justice, and more.

Green Team youth take on a variety of projects from building community gardens, planting trees, cultivating gardens, to fixing and giving away bikes that connect the youth with their neighborhood and with the environment surrounding it.

"Environmental stewardship takes on a very different meaning in the context of a distressed urban setting. Planting a tree or a small garden, cleaning up trash or removing graffiti is often a first and most powerful experience many of our young people have with improving their local environment and making positive community change," explained Wendy Hawthorne of Groundwork Denver.

With support from a strong partnership with the National Park Service, Groundwork USA is helping their network of affiliates broaden their Green Teams' horizons even further: once Groundwork youth get a feel for environmental stewardship on the ground in their own communities, they travel to a nearby National Park site to conduct a service learning project, whereby they learn about stewardship of public lands and potential career paths in federal land management.

"In my experience at Santa Monica Mountains [National Recreation Area], I learned that nature in all its forms is beautiful, and that we have to protect it," said Trevor, a member of the Groundwork San Diego Green Team.

On Thursday and Friday September 15 and 16, in Rocky Mountain National Park, Groundwork youth will participate in a daylong hike and a morning-long service-learning project. They will have hands-on opportunities to work, play and connect to the park. Groundwork youth will meet and interact with federal partners from the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management to discuss the relevancy of public lands to a rapidly urbanizing and diversifying country. "We are excited to engage the next generation of environmental stewards at Rocky. National Parks should reflect the changing demographics of this country," says Ben Baldwin, Research Learning Specialist at Rocky Mountain National Park, "and Groundwork is helping us take a big step toward that goal."

View the full article