YOUNG LEADERS RISING

Young people can be the most effective leaders in the children and nature movement.

On April 4, 2009 young people from across the nation joined together to celebrate Natural Leaders Day: Get Outside & Play! “We announced the official launch of the Natural Leaders Network and now we are entering a new era, one where nature-deficit disorder is but a long lost memory,” says Juan D. Martinez, national coordinator for the Natural Leaders Network, an initiative of the Children & Nature Network, with founding support from the Sierra Club: Building Bridges to the Outdoors and corporate support from The North Face.

Drawing 914 participants from across the nation, Get Outside & Play Day was a great success, and it’s just the beginning.

While the Natural Leaders Network will evolve over time, its core conception is to engage teenagers, college students and other young people; network them to each other; support new and existing programs for outdoors youth involvement (a resource list is on the way); and encourage young people to create innovative ways to serve as catalysts and leaders in the children and nature movement.

“Often we find that the people who are talking about connecting youth with nature are not so young, so the Natural Leaders Network seeks to connect all the youth who are already doing so and those who want to but don’t know where to look for a support system,” says Martinez.

His personal story is a testament to the power of nature to help young people develop their own leadership. Now 25, he grew up in South Central Los Angeles. Suzanne Bohan, a reporter for the Bay Area News Group, wrote in 2007: “A glorious night sky filled with piercing stars changed Juan Martinez’s life forever when he was 15 and on the edge of entering a life of gangs, drugs, fast money and violence. After he stepped off a bus at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, dispatched as part of an ecology program at his South Central high school in Los Angeles, the night sky dazzled him.” Martinez told Bohan, “I’d never seen anything like it. It was curiosity that came back to me. And I started realizing my life could be more than just what I thought possible.”

After that experience, Martinez rejected any gang affiliation. He went on to become a statewide volunteer coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Building Bridges to the Outdoors program. He now leads C&NN’s Natural Leaders Network initiative. He hopes to become an environmental lawyer.

On June 5-7, Natural Leaders from around the country will travel to the Headlands Institute in the Bay area to take the initiative to the next stage of development. In addition to Natural Leaders from the U.S., young representatives from Canada will attend.

“We know we can change the trend of disconnection with nature,” says Martinez.

Natural Leaders can also connect young people to the kind of green jobs not usually associated with the future economy: ones related specifically to reconnecting the human race to nature. When I speak around the country, high school and college students and other young people often stand during the Q&A periods, or come up to me afterward, and say that they would like to change their major. They’d like to make a career of connecting kids – or people in general – to nature. They ask what college they should attend, what their opportunities might be.

Such questions should be easier to answer. To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive career guide that offers information on an array of specialties – urban designers, teachers, health care workers, park rangers, nature therapists, botanical gardeners, and so forth – related to connecting people to nature. Yes, we see much career discussion on the issue of sustainability. However, sustainability and connecting people to nature, while overlapping, offer different career arenas. My sense is that many young people would be excited to pursue careers connecting people to nature, if career guides and other resources were available and widely known.

A campaign is needed, one that would elevate, organize and publicize connecting people to nature as a rich field for future jobs and research.

Meanwhile, the Natural Leaders concept is spreading internationally. On March 7, at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, C&NN President and CEO, Cheryl Charles and I were privileged to sign an endorsement of a youth-led initiative in Canada, emerging in association with the Child in Nature Alliance, the new nationwide effort to connect Canadian kids to nature. The youth initiative declaration said, in part: “Within this continuing movement to connect children with nature, we affirm the importance of youth voice and involvement in every aspect of what we collectively seek to achieve.”

In the U.S., Martin LeBlanc agrees. LeBlanc is National Youth Education Director for the Sierra Club and, as vice president of the Children & Nature Network, a pivotal leader in the children and nature movement. He believes that the future of the children and nature movement will be shaped largely by young people from inner cities, suburbs and rural areas around the world.

LeBlanc, who is in his thirties, is not far removed from his own transformative experience in nature, one he often credits with turning his life around. I’m hoping he’ll tell that moving story on the C&NN site someday, but in the meantime, Martin offers this tale:

“There are countless examples of young people who have benefited from the outdoors but one always sticks out in my mind. Jerone Thadison was a young man from the tough west side of Chicago who had never had an outdoor experience. He had never seen stars. Then, in 2006, he attended a Boys and Girls Club and Sierra Club three-day Camp along the Indiana Dunes and it changed his life – so much so that he decided to major in biology at Chicago State University and began leading outdoor activities in his neighborhood.

“He can describe every second of his first outdoor experience, from getting off the bus, to the new smells, to hiking, to the campfire. His experience shows the power of even a three-day experience. As Jerone says so well, ‘The outdoors gave me a way out of my hood, and now I can come back and bring the outside into my hood.'”

Perhaps, as a young person, you’re already helping young people find a sense of meaning, wonder and hope in the natural world. If so, let us hear from you. To inspire others, tell us your story.

Check Out More News and Resources