http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/20090623_Youth_Corps_0.mp3
Leaders of the Northwest Michigan Youth Conservation Corps found out recently they’ll get $1.5 million this year to expand into 10 area schools in four counties. The state will award that amount each year, for up to five years. Up until now, the Youth Corps was a pretty small operation. It’s modeled after Great Depression-era programs that kept kids out of trouble by putting them to work planting trees and building trails.
It’s mid-afternoon and the mercury reads 88 degrees. Sixteen-year-old Kendra Scott wipes her forehead on her shirt sleeves. She’s digging up plants with a metal shovel at an old farmstead that’s now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
“EEW, you guys see that sweat, like, on both arms from just going like this? That is so sick. Gross,” she says.
The flower bulbs will be replanted in other parts of the park.
Kendra says she earns “good money” for this work, minimum wage. As her co-worker, 18-year-old Alicia Bowles, talks about longing for that first check, Kendra says she did try looking for another job this summer.
“There’s just nothing out there,” she says. “But, I don’t know, I don’t think I would trade this job. I like this job a lot. For sure.”
Kendra and Alicia are students at Traverse City High School. It’s an alternative school for students who would struggle to get through 12th grade in a traditional setting. Alicia, for example, is a teen mom. Money’s tight at home, and she has to help pay the bills: groceries, and housing.
For now she and Kendra are part of a lucky few, 16 students the program can pay and put to work this summer. Their leader says the phone is ringing off the hook – five calls a day on average from others begging for a spot.
So Youth Corps leaders are celebrating the news the program will soon be much larger. By spring this Youth Corps hopes to have 80-to-100 students working, from select schools in Kalkaska, Leelanau, Benzie and Manistee counties.
After hours of pulling metal shingles off the roof of a barn, Bill Watson walks to the water cooler, bends down, and drenches his entire head. Watson is in charge around here. But he’s not the type to stand to the side while his team gets its hands dirty.
“No, I think you have to work by example,” he says. “I mean they’re not going to buy into anything I have to say if I don’t work as hard or harder than they do. And that’s getting more and more difficult as I get older, but it’s, you know, its part of the job.”
He’s done the heavy lifting for this program in other ways, too. Last summer, Watson lost his job running a Youth Corps out of Traverse City High School. The school still has a small program, but it had lost the pool of funds it used to pay his salary. Unemployed, and struggling to pay his own bills, Watson volunteered his time and found ways to keep his student crews on the job, and getting paid – even when he wasn’t.
He partnered with the National Park Service, The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, and a local conservancy. And this money, which comes from the federal education program No Child Left Behind, was not awarded through a school – but through a Traverse City nonprofit called SEEDS.
“SEEDS itself – the organization SEEDS – its vision its mission is about ecology and environmental stewardship and sustainability and green jobs and green building,” Watson says. “And these are all the things we’re trying to teach these youth in my opinion, you know.
“The buzz words: green economy, green jobs. Well, we’ve been doing this for five years. This is a green economy, we’re working outside and we’re sustaining the environment and doing invasives removal and historic building preservation.
“And we want to find ways to get involved with weatherization work and anything we can do to make their chances at employment better, at what I think is probably one of the bleakest periods that I ever remember.”
Historical Architect Kim Mann: “When Bill Watson told us he was starting his own Youth Corps, we were really happy about that because we knew the kind of program that he ran, and just the quality of kids that he brought to the program.”
Mann works for Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Together with park service employees, and volunteers from other area nonprofits, Youth Corps students are getting trained in scaffolding, and helping to tear down an old barn. The park service will salvage as much of the dimensional lumber off of the barn as possible, so that it can be used for other projects in the park.
“You’re so thankful for the extra labor and the extra help,” Mann says of Watson’s Youth Corps students. “And you’re just thankful for the amount of attention you can give to these kids that come because a lot of times people in their lives have not spent any time with them. And so just to see the same people every week or every day and sometimes – like this year – every year because some of the same people are coming back and you know them by name and you know how they work and so you know you can count on them to help the new kids.”
One of those veterans of the program this year is Chris Parsons, who goes by Buffalo – a nickname his brother gave him. He’s 19, in his third year. In the Youth Corps, Buffalo has learned painting, had training on chain saws, first aid – and hopefully by the end of the summer, wilderness first responder training.
Today he learned a bit about roofing. “Yeah, I don’t think I want to do it everyday for the rest of my life. Too hot,” he says.
Buffalo credits the Youth Corps for helping him to graduate high school.
“Yeah, we got the credit for working, and I was never really good in school,” he says. And to work, you have to do good and show up.”
And now he’s looking into college training, in small engine repair.