There's an effort underway to get young people involved in environmental work. Those efforts have resulted in a variety of paid summer internships — some focused on green infrastructure, others land restoration or urban food production.
A recently awarded $500,000 grant from the EPA will financially fuel collaboration among 13 organizations. MKE’s Environmental Youth Collaborative (EYC)'s goal is to expand and coordinate summer internship experiences for young people. They collectively employ more than 100 young people.
Dominic Inouye heads the internship program for one of those organizations, Teens Grow Greens.
READ: Milwaukee Teen Leadership Program Makes Neighborhood Greenhouses Its Home
“I think it’s like any kind of collaboration. It starts with organizations that have known about each other for years, who really just start talking. And that talk just started to really gel. So the idea of a collaborative and collaborative funding started to be introduced … we’re determined to make something like this work,” Inouye says.
Teens Grow Greens, now entering its 10th year, focuses on offering young people paid internships in culinary, urban gardening, entrepreneurship and a newly-created city exploration internship.
This summer was the first opportunity for interns from all 13 organizations to begin to interact. “And as the years go on, I think the collaborations are going to become even stronger,” Inouye says.
Another member is Menomonee Valley Partners. Nia Smith heads its summer STEM internship designed to introduce high school youth to engineering, architecture and manufacturing firms based in the valley.
Smith values the collaborative as a way to build trust among its members.
“So if there’s ever an issue or a question, now I have so many more people to call upon to help solve problems. And that’s also what we’re trying to do with our youth — for them to see connections between different organizations and hopefully keep those relationships but also continue the work as they grow up into adults,” Smith says.
Golda Meier High School student Bryson Taylor says interning with Menomonee Valley Partners this summer gave him the opportunity to see parts of Milwaukee he’d never seen before.
“I started to like it a lot more. I didn’t grow up here. I actually grew up in Texas, so it was nice getting to know the area. And I care about the environment, and I want to help it, and it just feels nice to be able to do something about it," Taylor says. "To be able to help out the environment, you know."
Fellow Golda Meier student and Menomonee Valley Partners STEM intern Henry Argeropoulos shares Taylor’s concern about the environment.
“We need to have a stack in the environment because if we don’t, eventually it will be gone, and we won’t really have an environment to exist in. So I think we need to act now rather than later,” Argeropoulos says.
He's considering interning with another EYC organization next summer.
“I think it’s a really good idea ‘cause you can get into one program, and then you learn about all the others. You can hop from the next to the next and just sort of get internship and experience and job experience through all your high school and maybe like pre-college summers,” Argeropoulos says.
That’s exactly what MKE’s Environmental Youth Collaborative is hoping to achieve.
