Everyday Champion: Nate Faris

This story is a part of our Everyday Champions series. Helping youth succeed takes commitment and action from our whole community. Everyday Champions are people who are committed and who act in small and big ways to support youth in central Indiana. Do you know someone who you think would make a great Champion for Youth? Click here to get started.

Everyday Champion Nate Faris, Certified Arborist and Youth Tree Team Director at Keep Indianapolis Beautiful (KIB), has developed a truly outstanding Youth Tree Team, an innovative program that combines environmental improvement efforts with workforce skills development. Youth work three days a week to water, mulch and prune trees planted by KIB volunteers around the city. They spend the fourth day on some enrichment activity, from visiting college campuses, meeting landscape professionals, learning how to open a bank account or rafting down the White River.

“With a background in both scouting and youth ministry, he knows well what motivates teenagers and is neat to watch in his role,” says Linda Broadfoot, KIB Vice President of Development and Public Relations.

According to Linda, the following story is just one example of the impact that Nate and the Youth Tree Team have had on our community.

As a high school freshmen, Jake had gotten into some disciplinary problems, and his future prospects looked dim. Jake's teacher handed him a flier about the Youth Tree Team. Although he was worried that trouble he had gotten into would prevent him from being considered, Jake was accepted. He spent the summer watering, pruning, mulching and staking newly-planted trees and getting paid for his meaningful work to help our environment. Jake came back to KIB each summer in high school. After 3 years as a member, Jake became a Leader in summer 2009. He served as a guide and role model to his teammates, and an inspiration to everyone at KIB. Jake's a freshman again, in Landscape Architecture at Purdue. Jake credits Nate and the Youth Tree Team with showing him a path where that interest could lead to a career.

What is your profession or vocation?
I am a Certified Arborist and I direct the Youth Tree Team program at Keep Indianapolis Beautiful. I hire high school youth to work in crews to water and care for newly planted NeighborWoods trees in Marion County, Indiana.

How are you an Everyday Champion for Youth?
I think I am a champion for youth by both setting clear boundaries with youth and, at the same time, befriending them. I aim to make good use of the creative tension between being a friend of youth and being an employer of youth. Such a situation allows for youth to feel both valued for who they are as well as invested in and responsible for their crew's work, and the work of the Youth Tree Team program in general.

What impact do you hope to make on youth?
I hope to give high schoolers a great first job that gives them life skills (punctuality, responsibility, teamwork, leadership), job skills (proper tree and plant care), connections to local green-collar job (landscape architecture, tree care), and experience with the environment (rafting on the White River, learning how to identify tree species).

What’s one thing that you wish an adult had told you when you were a young person?
I value the work you are doing, and you are on the right track.

What do you want to do next to support youth?
I want to make connections with local green-collar professionals--landscape architects, tree care specialists, etc.--in order to connect youth with meaningful jobs when they have graduated from our program.

Spending Time with Nature

Now that spring has finally arrived in Central Indiana, I’m reclaiming my “morning moment” routine: before rushing off to work, I sit on my back porch for five minutes. I listen to the songbirds, watch nuthatches run upside down on the walnut trees and count squirrels. These few moments in my tiny corner of nature help me stay centered during the day.

photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

As journalist Richard Louv pointed out in his 2008 best-seller Last Child in the Woods, spending time in nature is an essential human need and a rare occurrence for many of today’s children.

…Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment—but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading…

As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any other forests. Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming. But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths. I wandered those woods even in my dreams. A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening
to the wind and watching the clouds move.

This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child—and adult—development…

photo by Isado

Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature—in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.
– excerpted from Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

Environmental Education Week April 11-17, 2010, gives educators and youth development professionals a springboard for helping children explore their natural world. A program of the National Environmental Education Foundation, the event website provides useful, fun ideas and activities for all ages.

You might even be able to get teenagers excited about Planet Connect’s Get Green video contest that challenges high school students to submit a one to two minute video showing how they’re reducing their carbon footprints. Entry deadline is May 2nd and prizes for winners include Apple computers and iPads.

Louv reminds us of nature’s wonderful calming effects, and we should remember our children learn from the behavior of the adults in their lives. "View nature as an antidote to stress," Louv wrote. “All the health benefits that come to a child come to the adult who takes that child into nature. Children and parents feel better after spending time in the natural world—even if it’s in their own backyard.”