Watts Youth Nature Clubs
Year 1 Annual Report |
Jump to annual report details (2023-2025)| Amount | $43,312 |
| Grantee | GreenSpacesLA |
| Award Year | 2022 |
| Funding Source | General Fund, Outdoor Equity Program |
| Project Type | Program Operation |
| Project Status | In Progress |
Description
Conduct the GreenSpacesLA Watts Youth Nature Clubs program for residents near the Watts Imperial Courts Unity Garden. This program will include approximately 29 activity days in the community for approximately 600 participants and approximately 5 trips to natural areas for approximately 130 participants during 14 months of programming.
Activities in the community will include Youth Nature club with local Love Wins charity; Youth Nature Club with local Children Mending Hearts charity; High School Green Club with Verbum Dei High School; Youth Nature Clubs Senior Outreach and Youth Nature Unity Day & Gathering of all three clubs.
Trips to natural areas outside of the community will include Hike with Park Ranger Chief Joe Losorell at Griffith Park; Agents of Discover Day trip at Los Angeles Arboretum; Underwood Farms Educational Farm Tour in Moorpark; Alma Backyard Farms Visit in Compton; MudTown Farms.
Community Home Base Location
2250 114th Street Los Angeles, CA 90059
| County | Los Angeles |
| Assembly District | AD 65 Mike A. Gipson (D) |
| Senate District |
SD 35 Laura Richardson (D) |
| Congressional District | CD 43 Maxine Waters (D) |
Program Goals
Service Learning/Career Pathway/Leadership Opportunities
Two opportunities for high school students to mentor youth, ages 5 – 13, in the YOUTH Garden Clubs.
Twelve Verbum Dei High School Green Club members will have an opportunity to volunteer at the Los Angeles Civil and Human Rights & Equity Department.
Two Imperial Courts High School Juniors will have the opportunity to be mentored by GreenSpacesLA for Morehouse College scholarships.
Partnerships
ROC Era – will provide support to the Imperial Courts Youth Garden.
Children Mending Hearts – will provide assistance to the Jordan Downs Youth Garden Club.
Hancock Park Garden Club – will provide help with the YOUTH Garden Club.
Verbum Dei High School – will enable the Nickerson Gardens Green Club.
Red Eye / Watts Empowerment Center – will assist with the Unity Day event.
Mentoring
Mentoring after the grant performance period was optional, and the applicant indicated youth will be mentored only during this program performance period, although partners in the Watts community all work together to provide continuous mentoring opportunities for youth.
Annual Report Details
Programs may span from one year to multi-year, not to exceed four years. The specific length of the program is contained in the description above.
| Category | 2023 | 2024 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Youth Served | 836 | 65 | 901 |
| Days for Activities in the Community | 24 | 2 | 26 |
| Nature Area Trips | 5 | 0 | 5 |
List of Educational Goals Achieved
2023
The first Educational Goal was accomplished (Instruction in arts, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that connects the nature experiences, or environmental stewardship.). We tailored our youth nature clubs curriculum on plants, seeds, birds, bugs, soil, insects, butterflies, flowers and native pollinators to enable age-appropriate nature experiences with art, science and environmental stewardship. We used mathematics and technology to facilitate the lesson plans with microscopes, ipads, and textbooks. We also incorporated environmental stewardship in ALL of our field trips.
2024
List of Formed Partnerships
2023
RocEra partnership for field trips: tour 5 chosen nature trips were a huge hit with the kids in this group. We learned to tailor the age group of each of the trips more tightly than we had originally expected. For example, we found it best to tailor each trip to ONE of these three age groups: kids 3-6; kids 7-12; teens 13+ and not mix all the ages groups together in one trip.
RocEra and Children Mending Hearts partnerships for Youth Nature Club meetings: These partnerships were very good and our regular youth nature club meetings were much more successful than we had anticipated and the meetings became more and more popular as time went on, with many kids asking if we could come back sooner! We learned that afterschool meetings every week were better for our families than monthly saturday nature club meetings, so we amended our schedule to accomodate this. We also learned that summer programming was virtually impossible, as kids had camps and summer programs that kept them from coming to any of our nature club meetings. In the future, should we do nature clubs in the summer, we would structure it like a Nature Camp and run it for a full week for kids in the community.
Watts Empowerment Center partnership for our Unity Days: This partnership helped make our Unity days a success. The WEC is located next to our garden and we learned that we could attract a larger crowd of kids of all ages to our gardens on the Unity Days. We learned that the best Unity days in our garden were not on weekends, as we had done in the past, but at afterschool times for 2 hours before dinner time.
