When youth at Miraflores, a North Portland housing community, attend after-school activities with Portland Audubon, they might not realize they’re tapping potential career paths—they are just having fun outside.
Miraflores is a community of Hacienda CDC, Portland’s largest Latinx-led, Latinx-serving affordable housing provider, which has been partnering with Audubon for more than a decade to provide its youth with hands-on environmental education.
After school each week, while studying local birds and exploring green spaces, some of the youth have discovered a passion for nature. Over the years, that passion has grown as they attended camps and overnight visits at Portland Audubon’s Wildlife Sanctuary.
Now in high school, some of these youth are putting their passion into practice as Green Leaders—and getting paid for it. It’s all part of Portland Audubon’s emerging program that provides students with 80 hours of paid after-school training in Pacific Northwest ecology, education, and environmental justice.
This past summer, a handful of Green Leaders put their training into practice as paid educators at Audubon summer camps for about 40 kids at nearby parks and green spaces. The camps were a successful collaboration with the nonprofit Verde.
When the Green Leaders bring home the stipends they earn, their families can start to that this is more than just a hobby, it is also a professional pathway into a field their children care about.
“We hope to identify more and more youth who are really interested in environmental education because there are so many young kids who are so inspired by the program,” says Zahir Ringgold, Audubon’s Youth and Family Partnerships Specialist, who led the youth leadership training.
Zahir has watched Hacienda youth become intergenerational connectors, listening and responding to the needs of both adults and children in their community.
“When you have contact with the same families year over year, and kids can see other kids doing environmental education, they begin to see themselves there. That’s what actually helps build that sense of belonging.”
Over time, what’s emerged is not only a team of youth leaders but also a family advisory council within the Hacienda community. In addition to career pathways, a top concern of Hacienda families is ensuring safe outdoor spaces to enjoy in their neighborhood.
To meet this need, Audubon connected the community to the Friends of Baltimore Woods, an organization that is working to restore a nature corridor overlooking the Willamette River in St. Johns. This fall, the Green Leaders will join other Hacienda residents in helping restore Baltimore Woods into a thriving green space with views of the St. John’s Bridge.
Back at Miraflores in North Portland, Hacienda families have also brought nature right to their doorsteps by installing a native landscape that mirrors the area’s original forest habitat, another collaboration between Hacienda, Audubon and Verde. At the helm of Hacienda’s efforts in/for this collaboration are Pilar Palos, Hacienda’s Manager of Youth & Family Services, and Maria Escalera, Expresiones Lead Coordinator. Other partners include the Girl Scouts, Backyard Habitat, Columbia Land Trust and others.
“There’s a net running between these organizations, with pathways running back and forth between us. It’s exciting,” says Emily Pinkowitz, Director of Education at Portland Audubon. “We’re moving toward the same goal, which is to create safe, inclusive spaces for families to engage with nature.”
Funding from the Gray Family Foundation helped support staff time, stipends for youth Green Leaders and materials for the workshops.
“Gray was the first funder that we secured for this program, and it’s what enabled us to get the program off the ground,” Emily says. “It was essential.”