by Heather Phelps, Student Resource Specialist,Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education
Young people today are very concerned about the environment and climate change, and they need adult allies to encourage and support them. If some members of your church are also concerned about the environment and climate change, that is a point of connection with youth in your community.
What can you do?
1) Find a few interested adults
Collect a few interested people and pick a name for your group (Environmental Mentors? Earth Ambassadors? Youth Allies? Youth Support Team?).
Two to five people is a fine group size. It may seem that a large group makes the work easier, but it also makes the organization and logistics and decision-making harder—it’s hard to even collect everyone together for a meeting. People who might be interested in joining you include your church Green Team (i.e. Care of Creation Team), your youth pastor, or members of your community.
2) Assess your strengths
Spend an hour getting to know each other and brainstorm what you have to offer.
Teens need adult allies for
- Time (you might think teens have a lot of time, but with the pressures of school and grades and sports and college applications and multiple extracurricular activities and part-time jobs, they may have a lot fewer hours to research solar installers or talk to the school board than you do).
- Expertise (e.g. how to do electrical wiring, how to do woodworking, gardening experience).
- Know-how (e.g. how to apply for a grant, how to organize an event, how to do publicity).
- Connections (with experts, local businesses, community leaders, local politicians, school board members, churches, etc.).
- Funds (kids don’t have a lot of money or savings: what you might spend on a vacation trip or a bathroom remodel is an unreachable sum to them).
- Encouragement (everyone needs an enthusiastic cheerleader, someone who has confidence in them, and offers words of affirmation and helpful feed-back).
- Interest (someone who cares about what they’re thinking & doing).
- Respect (someone who takes them and their concerns seriously, and values their ideas).
3) Make contact
Find your group’s extrovert (or anyone who is bold about talking to strangers). This person can call up your local high school and ask if they have a student environmental club or student green team. (You might be able to find this out by looking online at the school’s website.) If such a club exists, it will have one or more teacher advisors. Ask the school office for the name of the advisor(s) and their contact info. (Once you have teachers’ names, you can probably look up their email addresses on the school’s website.)
If reaching out to the first high school on your list doesn’t go anywhere (maybe they don’t even have a green team yet), don’t get discouraged—try contacting a middle school, private school, or another high school.
4) Introductions
Send an email to the advisor(s) introducing yourself. Sometimes people feel more comfortable working with one person as a point of contact, rather than immediately interacting with a whole group of strangers. I suggest you don’t begin your introduction with your church affiliation—let that naturally come up later. Folks can shy away from churches, both because the public school system doesn’t want to favor any religion (church and state are separated in the U.S.), and because many people have had some bad experiences with churches that had agendas and ulterior motives (i.e. churches only interested in converting folks or lecturing them from the Bible).
Lead with something you have in common, such as talking about your shared community, any connection you have to the high school (Are you an alumnus? Did your children attend? Do you know the principal or any teachers or staff at the school?), and of course your interest in the environment.
Express your interest in what the environmental club is doing, and mention your group’s desire to be their allies, if there’s any way you can be of service and support them and their efforts/projects. If you have particular expertise, or have access to funds, or could help them raise funds for projects, mention that.
Be aware that teacher advisors can get busy and overwhelmed, so don’t take it personally if they don’t get back to you right away, or if you fall off their to-do list. A polite “Just wanted to make sure you saw this” a week or two after your initial email is fine and appropriate.
5) Get Together
You can offer to come meet with the club to find out what they’re doing and offer to try to help them with whatever they need. Enjoy their passion, listen to their plans, dreams, and needs, and see if there’s a way to match those with what you have to offer.
Be aware that teens don’t like to have their ideas or projects “taken over” by adults. They want to be in the driver’s seat, making the decisions. So don’t try to be the leader, just because you’re older and you know better. Experimenting and trial and error is how kids learn and grow up. Envision your role more as a consultant, and the dynamic as a community collaboration. Make sure the teens are listened to, their ideas and opinions are valued, and treat them as respected equals, even if they could be your grandchildren.
Even if you end up doing much of the work behind the scenes on a project or event, the teens want the feeling of ownership, accomplishment, and success which comes with the limelight and applause. Let them have that; it’s about them, not us.
6) See Where it Goes from There
This might turn into a wonderful and rewarding collaboration—you might even form life-long mentoring friendships with some young people. Or things might be slow to take off, or not gel at all to begin with. Count it a win that you’ve made contact and started to get to know teachers and students at the high school. Building relationships, networking, and opening lines of communication are the most important things!
Realize that kids sometimes do like to do things themselves, so don’t feel bad if they turn down your offer of help. They’ll appreciate your offer, and they’ll appreciate your interest, and your willingness to listen to their ideas, plans, hopes, dreams, and fears. Encourage them to keep in touch, to share their success stories so you can cheer for them, and tell them to feel free to contact you in the future if they need any help. (Even talking to adult organizations, good collaboration opportunities may not come up till six months or a year later.)
7) Money
If you offer funding, they probably won’t turn that down!
Large projects—like school solar panels—really shouldn’t be the responsibility of kids. The school district should budget (or do bonds or a referendum) for that sort of capital upgrade. But smaller things, like the following, can be funded for $100-$500.
Low-Cost Teen Projects: Composting, school gardens, pollinator garden, urban tree planting, bird houses/baths/feeders, bus rental for an outing/field trip, snacks or pizza for an event, prizes for a competition, Green Team T-shirts, materials for making displays, money for printing large banners or posters, bulbs for a light-bulb swap, classroom power strips, paint for wall murals or storm drains, bike racks, educational kits for hands-on learning and experimenting with clean energy (like Kidwind mini-turbine kits, Snap Circuits Green Energy kits, demo-sized solar panels, etc.).
Ideas for Teen Outings
Nature preserve/nature hike, lake or stream (to do citizen science like test water quality, sample invertebrates, etc.), zoo/wildlife park (behind the scenes tour, or educational tour about ecosystems and global wildlife conservation), wildlife rescue or rehabilitation center (e.g. Wisconsin Big Cat Rescue in Baraboo, Hoo’s Woods Raptor Center near Milton), International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, solar farm, landfill, biofuel facility, recycling facility, farm that does regenerative or organic agriculture, guided prairie tour, bird watching, botanical garden (e.g. Olbrich in Madison, Rotary Garden in Janesville), Chicago Aquarium, tour of LED building/campus (e.g. Forest Edge Elementary School in Oregon WI, Holy Wisdom Monastery, Madison Friends Meeting House), tour of electric vehicle fleet (e.g. Madison City Fleet—electric police cars, trash trucks, fire engine; 3-wheeled bike maintenance vehicles, Natural History Museum (e.g. Milwaukee Museum, Chicago Field Museum), State Park or National Park, camping, backpacking, canoeing, x-country skiing, snowshoeing, dog-sledding, bike-trip, rent e-bikes or e-scooters to travel on bike paths, roadside or beach trash cleanup, removing invasive species in an area, planting trees in a park or to reforest an area, help crank solar panels at the community “Spring Solar Tilt” at Holy Wisdom Monastery, visit to talk to politicians at state capitol, protest demonstration or march.
Anything that gets youth outside, experiencing and interacting with nature or observing animals; or learning about the environment, clean energy, or sustainable practices; or doing a service project to help nature or encourage positive change, is great!
Note on #3 & #4
Don’t lead with “We’re from X church”
Schools and teens will be suspicious of you (i.e. “the church”) because they’ve had bad experiences with other churches—those churches whose only interest in talking to people outside the church is “saving the lost.” So you may want to clear the air and relax everyone by coming out and saying up front, “We’re not trying to get anyone to come to our church, and we’re not here to convert anyone. We’re concerned about the environment and climate, and we know today’s youth are too, so we thought maybe we could be their allies in whatever they’d like to do in that regard.”