A GYF intern reflects on his experiences as a ranger

HB Cho poses with a 1930s era automobile at the King Center

By HB Cho

More often than I’d like to admit, life just happens to me. It seems to enforce its own will and plot its own course, with seemingly no regard for my expectations or predictions.

My working at Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site through Greening Youth Foundation is a clear case in point. I didn’t expect to get the job as a park ranger, didn’t really know what it was when I got it, and now I think it was the one of the best things that could ever happen to me. When I first visited the site in 2008, I got to go into just one building and thought it was disappointingly small for commemorating the man who represented an important and proud chapter of American history. It in fact was small, but I didn’t realize how much of the site I was missing. So I had very low expectations at the beginning of my assignment.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for all that to change. First of all, there is much more to the site than just the visitor center, where my previous exploration had ended. Across the street is the King Center, where Dr. King’s body (and the body of his wife Coretta) resides in a tomb, and his artifacts, including the Nobel Peace Prize, are displayed. Across just one more street is Dr. King’s childhood home. Two rows of nearly twenty houses, through which a boy called M.L. would have rode his bicycle everyday, have been restored back to their 1930s state.

The highlight of my duties as a ranger was to give tours inside the house where Dr. King was born and raised. I got to talk to visitors from all over the world about the powerful message that is the foundation of a great leader. The immediate gratification that I got from the sincere gratitude and compassion of the visitors was a powerful motivator for me to keep learning and trying to improve their experience at the site.

The most precious gift I take from my time at the site is that of a role model. I always enjoyed reading biographies of people who achieved greatness and realized that nearly all of them had an extraordinary person in their lives who they could point to as their role model. I was often disappointed when I looked around and couldn’t find one of my own. Great men were plentiful in the books, but I couldn’t easily relate to them. But learning and talking about Dr. King and experiencing the world as he would have experienced it did precisely that for me. It was a thrilling opportunity. Not only was it fun to quite literally trace his footsteps in his childhood home, but learning about his family and the neighborhood, and being in his physical presence for me established a very personal relationship with him. I felt as if I were being reintroduced to a long-time friend who had grown up to become one of the most significant persons in the 20th century.

As Steve Jobs,the founder and CEO of Apple, once said, the dots in our lives will eventually connect. I can’t be more grateful to Greening Youth Foundation for providing me with this very precious dot and the experience of a lifetime.

Hundreds of environmental detectives enlighten their schools

Students at Atlanta Prep

By Ruth Kitchen, GYF Education Director

As we swing into the second semester of this school year’s Public School Initiative, we would like to celebrate the C.L.E.A.N. (Children Living Energetically Advancing Nature) certification of over 300 third-grade students from three schools in the metro Atlanta area.

We heard much laughter and screams of delight throughout the first semester as students explored worms, planted flowers in reusable cans, played Energy Hog Jeopardy, made watersheds, enjoyed free, unstructured play to get the body moving, ate nutritional snacks, and so much more. These committed Environmental/Wellness Detectives take their charges seriously as they spread the word throughout the school, their families and, ultimately, the community.

Ruth Kitchen and students at Springdale Park Elementary show their bird feeders

Over 200 students participating in 13 Eco-Force Clubs have been active in setting up a school wide recycling programs by:

• accumulating and decorating recycling boxes

• determining placement of boxes throughout the school

• heightening school awareness through PA reports and creation of posters

• transporting all recyclable material to the designated dumpster

These Eco-Forcers work to determine environmental or wellness issues and determine ways to address them. Some club projects include:

• recyclable art

• gardening

• composting

• candy wrapper wallets

• Operation Christmas Child

• “Green” concert fundraiser

Garrett plays guitar during lesson at Springdale Park

In order to bring the real world of environmental/wellness career opportunities face-to-face with the students, Green Speakers from various industries have visited various Eco-Force groups. William Wingate from The Georgia Conservancy enlightened the young men from Carson BEST Academy about the life of an environmental lobbyist.

Greening Youth Foundation is ringing in the New Year by adding 3 more C.L.E.A.N. programs and 6 Eco-Force Clubs. We look forward to working with this next group of environmental/wellness ambassadors who are the tentacles that will take the message beyond.

The culmination of all these efforts will be celebrated at our 3^rd annual Earth Day Fun Festival on April 23^rd. In partnership with Centennial Place Elementary (and 6 other schools), we will show you how a community comes together for a fabulous recycling event.  Many eco-vendors will be present to enlighten us with their “Green” initiatives and to display very creative products. It will be a day of environmental/wellness awareness and loads of fun playing carnival games, tasting nutritious food, and being entertained by various school and community performances.

Foundation starts a vital education and recycling program in Ghana

A boy at La Enobal School collects sachets

The Greening Youth Foundation has gone global! Youngsters at the La Enobal School in Ghana eagerly began instituting GYF’s education and recycling program in December, with the goal of helping their country begin the process of recycling its troublesome plastic water bags.

GYF’s environmental education and schoolwide recycling program, which has always been one of the major elements of the foundation’s work, currently operates in 20 schools in Georgia. Led by GYF board member Christa Sanders, in a partnership with the NYU (New York University) Accra program, for which Sanders is Associate Director, the Ghana initiative is bringing GYF’s education and recycling programs to Accra, Ghana’s capital city. As in the U.S., students who participate in GYF’s programs in Accra will be encouraged to institute a schoolwide Eco-Force Club. The mission of the club is to have students raise environmental awareness and become volunteers in their communities by acting as role models and mentors to their peers and younger students. GYF is working with the non-profit LifeLink to identify partner schools in Ghana. In addition to La Enobal, the GYF program will also be operating at two other Accra schools, Queensland International and Star Basic.

The introduction of the GYF program comes at a crucial time for Accra, Ghana’s largest city with a population of 2 million people. Accra is currently being overwhelmed by the small plastic water bags, known as sachets, that residents buy on the street as a cheap form of drinking water. The sachets act almost like public water fountains, providing a quick and refreshing 500 ml of cold water at a cost of less than five cents each. The most popular ice cream, yogurt and juices also come in small plastic bags. But the problem is that too many citizens simply drop the bags in the street when they are done. As a result, the bags are everywhere, blocking drains and leading to seasonal flooding, drifting out to sea and washing up on beaches. According to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, the plastic water bag accounts for 85 percent of the plastic waste in the city. Recycling is still in its infancy in the nation, making an environmental education and recycling program that begins with young people even more crucial.

sachets

G.K. Scott, Ghana’s Chief Director of the Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, said that although plastic bags had played a key role in the Ghanaian economy over the years, their widespread misuse and the indiscriminate and inadvertent littering posed a major threat to the health of the citizens and to national development.

When Erin Schrode, an NYU student who is an intern charged with implementing the Accra program for GYF, stepped in front of the students at La Enobal School in early December, she found a group of enthusiastic recruits in the mission to recycle the water bags. Schrode brought with her a bin made from recycled ice cream wrappers by TrashyBags, a company that has begun paying Accra residents to collect discarded bags so that it can turn them into products like backpacks and bins. The students took the bin and immediately began collecting discarded sachets from all over the school grounds. Schrode described the initiative as the “GYF Sachet Revolution.”

“When I brought up the idea of turning otherwise discarded wrappers into something new like the bin and backpacks and more, they loved it,” Schrode said. “All of the boys and girls were squealing with excitement. So I asked if they would want to be a part of collecting sachets and was met with a resounding ‘Yes!’ I told them someone like me would be coming to guide them through the collection process, more educational opportunities, like the Eco-Force Clubs, and a competition component in January. All were thrilled—and promised to start collecting that day.”

Students show off TrashyBag bin

Angelou Ezeilo, GYF Founder and Executive Director, said she is ecstatic about GYF’s jump across the Atlantic to Ghana.

“When I started GYF, I knew that it was our entire planet that was in peril, not just the United States or just Georgia,” she said. “So I knew that if we really wanted to make a difference, eventually we would have to move beyond the borders of the U.S. I am so excited that board member Christa Sanders has helped us become a global organization. And it’s especially satisfying that we are moving into Ghana at a time when the country so desperately needs a recycling program. As we know from our work here, if we can get the young people excited, eventually the adults will become excited too.”

GYF’s schoolwide curriculum fuses technology, music, sports, literature and old-fashioned fun to teach children the importance of being energetic stewards of the environment. To achieve its mission, GYF directly works with students and stresses the importance of recycling, water conservation, energy conservation, nutrition, physical activity, and re-connects children to the outdoors.

James Gabriel Duncan measures sawgrass in the Everglades

By James Gabriel Duncan

Working in the Everglades as a Greening Youth Foundation intern has been a bit of a homecoming for me. For a native south Floridian who has always been interested in the environment, the Everglades is a big deal—it is the third largest national park in the United States, the world’s largest restoration site and the source of water for millions of people. That said, I haven’t lived in Florida for a while and have only been able to volunteer in the park on and off over the years. It is great to be back!

The Greening Youth Foundation has afforded me the opportunity to work in the Hole In the Donut (HID), a massive effort to restore old agricultural lands to a wetland system called marl prairie, a marsh habitat. Around the research center I am known as the HID intern. The restoration work I am performing falls in two categories: exotics management and native seedling restoration.

The Hole In The Donut Restoration Project

The HID is a 6,600-acre site west of the entrance to the Everglades. These lands were cultivated for as much as 50 years before being acquired by the National Park Service and incorporated into the existing Everglades National Park during the 1970’s. The Everglades is a vast, nutrient-poor wetland that is characterized as a shallow, slow-moving river. People farmed this land by breaking up rock to raise the ground level and applying large quantities of fertilizer. Once the farmlands were abandoned, invasive species moved in. Today, unrestored areas of the HID are dominated by thick forests of an invasive plant called Brazilian Pepper (Schinus terebinthifolius).

Overhead shot of the Everglades

Restoring the HID is unlike any restoration project I have ever seen because it involves scraping the land down to the limestone bedrock. About six inches of rock and soil are removed and stored in 30-acre disposal mounds. With these six inches goes the high nutrient soils (as a result of the fertilizers) and that creates an environment too wet for Brazilian Pepper to thrive. These lands are not seeded in any way and are allowed to be swallowed up by the Everglades into marl prairie, an important wetland ecosystem to the park.

The HID is funded through a wetlands mitigation bank. Mitigation banks are a method of wetland preservation and were created by the national no-net-loss policy of wetlands in 1992. Through the program, developers can damage or fill in wetlands at a desirable site, as long as the offenders pay a fine towards building a wetland of equal or greater value somewhere else. The funds from the wetland mitigation bank cover the 6,600-acre HID program. So far, more than 4,000 acres have been restored over the past 13 years through rock scraping. The marshes are coming back! Invasive species have been kept at bay through the changes made to the landscape, along with the efforts of the HID team.

Greening Youth Foundation’s Work

The work here consists of applying herbicide on non-native invasive plants and restoring native plants to the HID lands. A typical day for me in the Everglades consists of strapping on a backpack full of herbicide and going out to the restored area with machete in hand to tackle some invasive species. The species the HID team targets are Brazilian Pepper, non-native grass, and a variety of exotic woody plant species. We find them by walking through the wetland or tackling the soil disposal mounds. Often times before or after making a field visit I work in the greenhouse.

One of the issues with the HID project is that some natives aren’t recruiting (i.e. showing up) to the extent they should be. The goal of the project is to restore the marl prairie, an ecosystem that is dominated by sawgrass (Cladium jamaicense) and muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris). Unfortunately both have been slow to recruit and I am working on ways to grow these native seedlings in the greenhouse to plant in restoration sites. For instance, sawgrass seeds are difficult to work with because of viability and flotation issues. I have been experimenting with sawgrass seed pretreatments to penetrate the seed husk and have even set up a pilot experiment; my results will be used to plant thousands of seedlings. I have also been working with muhly grass and am trying to determine the best method for growing muhly grass in the greenhouse.

The work in the Everglades has kept me busy! I enjoy learning about the different plants in the Everglades. We had a plant walk at my research center and it seemed like every other plant was either endangered or found nowhere else in the world. Ultimately I am happy that I have been given the opportunity to learn and apply my skills to a project I care about.