Baldwin Hills Nature Nexus

NNI recruited 35 high school students to participate as interns. Interns received hands-on training in environmental stewardship, gained leadership skills, and served as community mentors in nature activities. Collectively, these students invested over 3,000 hours in program activities. NNI staff conducted 7 career workshops at the Baldwin Hills library where NNI staff presented an overview of the program, career pathways, and opportunities to pursue the Conservation Studies Program at West LA College to a total of 55 library participants. NNI staff offered nine community nature walks in local parklands (103 attendees of all ages), connecting with the community home base to promote these walks in person and through social media.

Summer Fellows - NNI recruited 18 Summer Fellows from West LA College, a local community college adjacent to the Baldwin Hills Parklands to assist with community nature walks and activities. Summer Camp - NNI hosted 15 campers for Youth Summer Camp (serving ages 8-11) June 19-22, 2023 at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. Our partner, Outward Bound California, led a 5-day backpacking trip for 8 youth who gained team-building skills while immersed in the beautiful landscape hiking through Joshua Tree State Park.

Our Greenhouse Program for high school students completed a school year cohort and recruited and welcomed a new cohort. Students in this program engage in science, art, teamwork, public speaking, and habitat restoration activities. Student projects included topics such as making ink from natural materials, creating a story map about the ecological history of the local waterway, noise pollution in the park, and science illustration of native and non-native plants. Keeping a field notebook is a fundamental practice in the program, allowing students to collect data, sketch, and write personal reflections. Discussions about natural resource career pathways are woven into this program, as well as our summer intern program, and on-site library presentations. Youth participants in our summer camp engaged in nature observation activities, using science tools like binoculars, and mini-projects like insect costume design that allowed them to apply their science knowledge in an arts context.

Nature Nexus Institute (NNI) deepened its relationship with the community home base library, at Baldwin Hills Library and Jefferson Library becoming a regular contributor to the library's community programming. This partnership enables NNI to promote nature activities, summer camp, and nature area trips to the diverse community in our targeted home base. Both library branches have been eager to collaborate with us for on-site programming well beyond our initial expectations, and we are expanding programming with them.

Our community home base library branch has also faced some challenges over the past year: they lost their teen librarian position in the fall and experienced a month-long closure for building maintenance in the spring. The closure forced us to postpone our planned bus trips to Ballona Wetlands for a later date. Additionally, they are working on building back to their pre-pandemic patronage levels, which has made for low attendance at on-site programs. Our partnership with West Los Angeles Community College, which is adjacent to the Baldwin Hills Parklands, has been a terrific source for recruiting community members to participate in nature activities. Our partnership with Outward Bound California provided alumni from our Baldwin Hills Greenhouse Program and West LA College Program with hands-on experience in a 5-day backpacking trip to Joshua Tree National Park in January 2023 that enhanced nature skills and strengthened student confidence and leadership abilities.

Our community programs included partnering with the Bresee Youth Group, Black Image Center, local Cub Scouts, and the local Sierra Club Inspiring Connections Outdoors (ICO) Program, all of which helped to bring community members of all ages to Baldwin Hills Parklands for nature walks and stewardship activities, many for the very first time. NNI staff have benefited from shared insights from the groups. We also established a new connection with a middle school in close proximity to Baldwin Hills Parklands, with school staff supporting students in achieving their community service hours requirement through participation in NNI’s stewardship events. This new school connection also supports our recruitment strategy for the Greenhouse Program. NNI has strengthened its collaboration with California State Parks: we co-led two LAWorks summer camp field trips to the Baldwin Hills Parklands, and we have initiated a monthly campfire program.

Our community home base, Baldwin Hills Library faced staffing challenges which resulted in NNI needing to expand outreach to other community groups within the community radius. In a city like Los Angeles, the grant's 5-mile radius for in-community may want to be revisited.

In October we collaborated with staff from the Los Angeles Public Library and San Mateo County Library to present about library-to-greenspace trips at the California Library Association Annual Conference. Interest in our presentation was high, with over 100 library professionals attending the session. It was an ideal venue to better understand both existing resources that support as well as barriers to partnerships between libraries and environmental organizations. The presentation was informative for NNI in planning future programs, and also helped to share the concept and framework to librarians throughout the state. An unforeseen challenge that we continue to face is library staff turnover, delays in librarian hiring, and library closures. Our hub branch has been understaffed for well over a year and has been subjected to building closures, making it very challenging to maintain momentum with scheduling and program logistics, but we are working around this with community groups.