The Borderlands Earth Care Youth (BECY) Institute is a paid summer internship for 15 to 20-year olds living along the US/Mexico border. The mission of the BECY Institute is to train rural youth to become the next generation of conservation leaders and land management decision-makers. The mission is actualized by a rigorous daily schedule of hands-on restoration work and a structured curriculum of marketable job, life, and leadership training. The BECY Institute weaves together physical, biologic, and community-based restoration in a 6-week program designed to educate and inspire youth to inject health into the damaged arid borderland ecosystems. Along with developing the tools necessary to become effective habitat restorationists, youth gain critical skills to blaze unique pathways towards careers in conservation. Youth work with a broad spectrum of innovative ecologically and socially-focused organizations and individuals, to learn about the wide variety of paths they can follow. A graduation requirement is the successful completion of a Community Restoration Project, so youth begin actively participating in the growing restoration economy of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. BECY graduates emerge as role models, so youth can better imagine positive professional conservation roles in the communities where they have grown up.
Results/Conclusions
As of February 2018, 83 high school-aged youth from Patagonia, Arizona to Douglas, Arizona have successfully graduated from the BECY Institute. Half of these graduates have switched their career focus to fields within conservation – with some dramatic examples being from engineering to forestry, optometry to conservation ranching, architecture to sustainable human development, marketing to ecology-centric marketing, law enforcement to public lands law enforcement, and on. BECY graduates come back as youth leaders within the program, and even facilitators to lead future cohorts. In 2015, a student seeking a Master’s Degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Northern Arizona University studied the effectiveness of shifting the BECY Institute interns. Carly Schmidt passed out questionnaires to BECY interns before and after the program, running an analysis on their responses. Overall, Schmidt’s study showed that interns gained knowledge in the fields of restoration and retained that information based on the hands-on nature of the program. The greatest shift was with the question, “If I was asked to restore a stream, I would know where to start.”