13 Milwaukee groups join forces to connect urban youth with environmentally-related careers

There are efforts to attract young people to environmental work, and these efforts have resulted in a number of paid summer internships – some focusing on green infrastructure, others on land restoration or urban food production.

A recent $500,000 grant from the EPA will provide financial support for collaboration between 13 organizations. The goal of MKE’s Environmental Youth Collaborative (EYC) is to expand and coordinate summer internships for young people. In total, they employ more than 100 young people.

(Left to right) Nia Smith of Menomonee Valley Partners, Dominic Inouye of Teens Grow Greens, and MVP summer interns Bryson Taylor and Henry Argeropoulos shared their thoughts on MKE’s Environmental Youth Collaborative.

Dominic Inouye leads the internship program for one of these organizations, Teens Grow Greens.

READ: The Milwaukee Teen Leadership Program finds its home in the greenhouses of its neighborhood

“I think it’s like any kind of collaboration. It starts with organizations that have known each other for years and just start talking. And those conversations evolved. That’s how the idea of collaboration and joint funding came about… we’re committed to making something like this work,” says Inouye.

Teens Grow Greens is now in its 10th season.^th The focus is on offering young people paid internships in culinary arts, urban gardening, entrepreneurship and a newly created urban exploration internship.

This summer, interns from all 13 organizations had the opportunity to interact with each other for the first time. “And I think as the years go by, the collaboration will only get stronger,” says Inouye.

Another member is Menomonee Valley Partners. Nia Smith leads the STEM summer internship program, which aims to expose high school youth to the engineering, architecture and manufacturing companies based in the valley.

Menomonee Valley Partners’ STEM summer interns gained insight into the fields of architecture, engineering and manufacturing.

Smith values collaboration as a way to build trust among its members.

“So if there’s ever a problem or a question, I now have a lot more people I can turn to to help me solve problems. And that’s also what we’re trying to accomplish with our youth – that they see the connections between different organizations and hopefully maintain those relationships, but also continue the work as they grow up,” Smith says.

Golda Meier High School student Bryson Taylor says his internship with Menomonee Valley Partners this summer gave him the opportunity to see parts of Milwaukee he had never seen before.

“I liked it a lot better. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in Texas, so it was nice to get to know the area. And I care about the environment and I want to help it, and it’s just a nice feeling to be able to do something about it,” Taylor says. “Being able to help the environment, you know.”

Henry Argeropoulos, a fellow student at Golda Meier University and STEM intern at Menomonee Valley Partners, shares Taylor’s concern for the environment.

“We need to have a stack in the environment because if we don’t, eventually it will be gone and we will no longer have an environment to exist in. That’s why I think we need to act now and not later,” says Argeropoulos.

He is considering doing an internship at another EYC organisation next summer.

“I think it’s a really good idea because you can get into one program and then get to know everyone else. You can hop from one to the next and get internships, experiences and work experience throughout high school and maybe during the summer before college,” says Argeropoulos.

This is exactly what MKE’s Environmental Youth Collaborative aims to achieve.