Greening Youth Foundation and MLK Historic Site Join Forces to Create Future Environmentalists

In a groundbreaking collaboration, Greening Youth Foundation and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site have entered into a partnership that will expose hundreds of young people in metro Atlanta to the story of Dr. King while introducing them to careers in the environment and public land management.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. site is one of 11 National Park Service sites in Georgia, but it’s the only one in the city of Atlanta. The King site is one of the top tourist attractions in the Southeast, drawing approximately a million visitors per year. The site was established in 1980 to preserve the places where Dr. King was born, worked, worshipped and is buried. The Park is comprised of 34 acres and includes Dr. King’s birth home, the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and Dr. King’s gravesite. A major feature of the site is the interpretative presentations on Dr. King’s life. Officials from the National Park Service would like to use the partnership with Greening Youth to expose more young people to the behind-the-scenes work that goes into managing a major NPS site.

“Our relationship with Greening Youth Foundation underscores the broader commitment of the National Park Service to engage underserved youth with public lands,” said Judy Forte, superintendent of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. “Through this agreement, we and the Greening Youth Foundation hope to inspire a progressive corps of future leaders who cherish their role as stewards of American heritage.”

Though public land management and forestry services account for a large percentage of the jobs in the United States, careers in this area aren’t perceived as accessible to youngsters in underserved communities—a fact that the Greening Youth Foundation is committed to turning around.

“As the environmental industry becomes increasingly important to the overall health of the U.S. economy, we think it’s crucial that more young people, particularly those in communities that have been denied access, be exposed to the multitude of fabulous careers available to them in the environmental world,” said James Ezeilo, Operations Director for GYF. “We are so excited that hundreds of children in Greening Youth schools will have a chance to get this exposure at one of the most important and best-known NPS sites in the country.”

GYF Americorps members will work on projects throughout the 22 structures at the King site, weatherizing buildings, conducting green audits and trying to reduce the site’s carbon footprint. In addition, youngsters from the 12 Greening Youth schools in metro Atlanta will visit the King site on regular field trips throughout the year. As part of its programming, Greening Youth Foundation uses a curriculum that fuses technology, music, sports, literature and old-fashioned fun to emphasize the importance of respecting and protecting the environment and to engage students as active participants in their own education.

An impressive array of environmental activists and groups came together in Atlanta at the end of September for a powerful conference to address the dearth of diversity in the green community. The multitude of African-American, Hispanic, Asian and Native-American environmentalists that gathered in the Hilton Atlanta Airport Hotel for the conference, called “Breaking the Color Barrier in the Great American Outdoors,” served as a powerful thrashing of the myth that environmental activism is the exclusive preserve of white people.

The conference was organized by Greening Youth Foundation board member Audrey Peterman and her husband Frank Peterman, the founders of Earthwise Productions, an environmental consulting firm. Numerous panels and roundtables during the three-day conference addressed such issues as the role of public lands in modern society, educational experiences in the outdoors and how grassroots organizations can grow and thrive in the current economic climate. Conference attendees also got a chance to visit the MLK Jr. National Historic Site near downtown Atlanta, hike the trail at the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area and go canoeing in the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area.

GYF Executive Director Angelou Ezeilo said the conference was a thrilling testimonial of the many environmental activists around the nation who are doing important work that has long gone unrecognized by the general public and the mainstream media. Ezeilo was a panelist at the conference’s workshop on the plight of grassroots organizations, which was ably moderated by GYF Operations Director James Ezeilo.

Generation We speaks at town hall meeting

One of the conference highlights was a town hall meeting focusing on the concerns and perspective of young adults, sometimes referred to as Generation We. Youth delegates from a half dozen organizations spoke to the audience about the focus of the environmental work they are doing. They also got a chance to direct questions to a prestigious panel of public officials, including Bob Stanton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and David Vela, Southeast Regional Director of the National Park Service. The youth delegation included Greening Youth Foundation’s Green Corps members—young adults who help implement the GYF program at schools across metro Atlanta. The Green Corps members were also given scholarships by the National Park Service to work at the conference, assisting speakers, helping to set up sessions and conducting surveys of conference attendees.

Angelou Ezeilo said she was proud of the presentation made by GYF’s Green Corps members at the town hall meeting.

“They rose to the occasion,” Ezeilo said. “They presented themselves well as the next generation of environmental leaders. In fact, their questions were so on point and well thought out that they were the only group of young people that stumped the directors.”

The Breaking the Color Barrier conference will be held every other year.