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By Susan Dugan
When the door to his boyhood dream
of making it in professional basketball started shutting for Jolon Clark as a student at South High, another swung open
to a path that would lead to his future career.
JOLON CLARK OVERSEES THE GREENWAY FOUNDATION'S SPREE PROGRAM, devoted to bringing young urban students in closer contact with the great outdoors, helping them to see the connection between their own environment and the natural world that surrounds them.
“I played basketball as a kid, and in middle
school traveled on competitive teams at my current height of
six-foot-three-and-a-half. But when I played at South freshman year, a couple
of things changed. People started catching up with me in terms of height, and
basketball stopped being fun for me because we weren’t very good. I started
realizing I wasn’t going to make it to the pros and thinking about what to do
with my life.”
Having visited Denver Public Schools’ Balarat Outdoor Education Center in fifth grade, he signed
up as a counselor to accompany students on trips. “I fell in love with working
with the kids and being outside. It really helped me a lot with confidence and
the ability to speak in front of people. And just having people I was responsible
for who looked up to me.”
The summer after junior year, Clark landed a
job with Venice on the Creek (the Greenway Foundation’s program offering
gondola rides on Cherry Creek through historic downtown Denver). “I was
learning about our urban waterways and how our city had grown up through
waterways all the way back to the Arapaho and Cheyenne (American Indian) camps,
through the towns of Auraria and St. Charles, and the
formation of Denver. And then the river becoming a place with raw sewage being
pumped in and dumping trash into the river. I started to appreciate what had
happened since, how the Greenway Foundation had been part of building that
infrastructure, reclaiming former landfill for parks and trails, and making the
water safe. And I fell in love with those waterways.”
With a newfound desire to help kids make the
kinds of connections with the river that he had, Clark majored in natural
resources with an emphasis in education at Colorado State University (and has
since earned a master’s in nonprofit management from Regis University),
continuing to work summers with Venice on the Creek. “I was manager and doing
all the recruiting and hiring by then, and when I graduated from college the
gentleman who ran the education arm of the Greenway Foundation – SPREE
(South Platte River Environmental Education) – was retiring. I stepped
right out of college into that job for the 2003-2004 school year, managing the
summer youth employment program the rest of the year.”
Clark set about trying to expand the program.
“SPREE had one educator and took about 1,500-2,000 kids a year to the South
Platte for field trips. One of the first things I looked at was how to get more
kids involved, even as school budgets were starting to tighten up. When I
started, it would be one class of 20-25 kids I was working with, but then
schools started saying, ‘If we’re going to pay for a bus, we need to have 60
kids.’ I just saw this missed opportunity of being truly able to engage kids in
hands-on learning. So I started to look at not only expanding our reach in
terms of the number of kids and schools, but also improving our educator-to-kid
ratio.”
Today SPREE employs three full-time
educators and serves some 6,000 students each school year while hosting other
events for children and families. Throughout all programming the mission
remains to help urban children make the connection between their own
environment and the river’s habitat in hands-on, meaningful ways that foster
critical thinking around complex issues, empowering them to make small changes
that yield big results.
“What we really focus on is finding ways to
connect people to nature in their own backyards. That strip of grass between
the street and sidewalk – if you turn over a rock, what can you find? And
then we have this river that flows right through the heart of this city where
you can go and fish and find crawdads. Helping them find a place where they can
connect to nature on a daily basis will hopefully create passionate individuals
who pursue the outdoors in both wilderness and urban settings, and have the
tools to be educated when it comes to the impact of their actions on the
environment.”
To this end, SPREE aims to teach kids how to instead of what to think. “A classic example is, you walk into a
bathroom and wash your hands, and you can use paper or the hand blow dryer to
dry your hands. It’s not that one of those is the right decision, but knowing
there are very different impacts from choosing paper and the water involved
with making paper products, versus the electric hand blow dryer
which uses coal. We do a lot of thinking about the difference between
education and advocacy, because a lot of times advocacy falls in the spotlight
selling this as ‘right.’ And then you have widespread adoption of a certain
behavior and more research comes out that says this was wrong. What happens is,
people get to the point where they say, ‘You know
what? I’m not even going to think about this anymore.’”
When dealing with children who have little
control over their choices, it’s even more important to engage them in the
decision-making process. “We take them on field trips to our river and have fun
all day interacting with amazing things: herons and beavers and crawdads. Then
we talk about what happened to our river, how it got bad, how it’s getting
better, and how their homes are connected to the river through storm drains. If
you see a piece of trash lying on the sidewalk and nobody picks it up, it’s
going to end up in our river. And that’s something you can do. It’s not a
problem that’s too big for me, it’s a problem I can solve.”
SPREE
also works with educators to reinforce what children are learning in class, and
provides hands-on, inter-disciplinary opportunities. Children haul buckets of
water from the river to experience what settlers had to do to get water to
their cabins, for example. “We try to recreate what people felt,” Clark says.
“When Cherry Creek flooded in 1860 it took out half the town of Auraria and half the town of St. Charles that people had
been building. To a third-grader, those people have as much in common with them
as dirt.”
To make the experience real, children create
a miniature town, building their own homes and other structures with Lincoln
Logs. Educators then simulate a flood that washes away all their hard work.
“For them, now, that moment in history is not just something they read that
happened to people a long time ago. It is happening now, and they know how it
feels.”
Eight Denver Public Schools send K-5
students on SPREE excursions every year. “Each trip is held at a different park
along the South Platte or one of its tributaries, and becomes a kind of rite of
passage. Kids get off the bus and they’re, like, ‘My brother came here and I’m
so excited to go!’ The repeat exposure is very powerful.”
The program also offers summer camps and the
River Ranger program that trains high school students year-round to become
certified environmental educators. “They get paid in the summer to do trail
work with the Nature Conservancy or Denver Parks and Recreation, and work with
summer camp kids, enabling them to experience what those kinds of jobs look and
feel like.”
Recently-announced
efforts to improve South Platte properties and projects call for the creation
of an urban camping area near I-25 and Santa Fe Drive. “I’m most excited about
redeveloping Johnson-Habitat and Vanderbilt parks to provide a kind of base
camp right in the city where kids can learn how to camp,” Clark says. “How to
pitch a tent, cook, pack, and prepare for a trip. Where to
rent or buy equipment, what’s available if they can’t afford equipment.
It’s really about giving a new generation of kids the skills they need to go
into the wilderness, set up camp, and feel safe.”
And building a generation of kids intimately
able to see the connection between their own long-term welfare and welfare of
their immediate and larger environment is what it’s all about. “When the
(Platte) river flooded in 1965 my boss Jeff Shoemaker was 11 or 12. His father
(Joe) was in the state senate and they were out of town and he got a call
saying, ‘This is the worst natural disaster in Denver’s history.’ He got off
the phone and Jeff asked him what was wrong. His dad told him it was horrible;
the river flooded. Jeff looked at him and asked, ‘What river?’
Because nobody went to the river in 1965; it was
filled with sewage. I want to create a generation of kids who could never say
that, because the river was part of their childhood.”
(Editor’s note: To learn more about
SPREE, visit spreeweb.org or call
303-743-9720. Venice on the Creek is closed for summer 2012, citing: “There is
a sufficient need for both upgrades and repairs to the infrastructure that
makes VOTC possible. These issues must be addressed in order to ensure a safe
and enjoyable experience for our customers. We are hard at work to bring VOTC
back in the summer of 2013!”) |
