Wellness Committee and YSI Meeting
On Nov. 16, juniors Ranya Zhang (Homestead High School) and William Xue (Palo Alto High School) met with the Youth Science Institute’s (YSI) president, Pamela Bentley Mills, at Vasona Lake County Park to explore a potential partnership between CPMentorship’s Wellness Committee and YSI. This meeting covered topics to further grow the Wellness Committee’s Harmony Greens community garden project, ranging from how we can utilize community and donations to creating more beneficial connections.
Key Takeaways
Ms. Mills provided the two high schoolers with several valuable insights that they will be able to utilize to further develop and expand their project.
Involve Families: When setting up community projects, it is important to invite families in addition to kids from the community, as adults are more likely to have bigger takeaways and retain new information for kids at home. For community gardens, it may be more likely for adults to create their own gardens at home and invite their kids to join. By broadening our projects beyond kids, entire families can learn new things and implement them into their lives.
Outreach: With so many large landscaping companies around the Bay Area, the amount of soil we need is essentially nothing compared to what they bring in or have stored. It can be very useful to outreach to these businesses and ask for donations, as we utilize their donations back into the community.
Donations: Many people in our communities likely have unused gardening tools laying around. By posting on neighborhood apps, printing flyers, or asking local businesses, it is possible to get donations of much-needed tools (shovels, wood, sheet metal, etc) from neighbors eager to give back to the community. Holidays like Giving Tuesday (Dec. 3, 2024) are great ways to reach out to your community and ask for donations.
Connection: Getting the right connections can get all your questions answered. Mills connected us with YSI’s head of education, allowing us to ask much-needed questions such as how to create educational gardening and wellness lessons, how to find the resources needed to make gardening workshops, and much more.
How We Can Help YSI
The high schoolers and Ms. Mills also discussed how they could get involved with YSI and support their initiatives as an organization offering immersive, free to low-cost science courses to children.
Media: our various youth committees have lots of social media users, and they want us to help them navigate social media. Additionally, we can include them in our mailing list for upcoming events, workshops, and committee meetings, so they stay informed on what we do.
Advertise: YSI and their nature centers are constantly looking for new visitors from the Bay Area. Help spread the word throughout the Bay Area on their nature center locations in Vasona Lake County Park (Los Gatos) and Alum Rock Park (San Jose). Vasona offers various activities regarding our ecosystem and the science behind it, while Alum Rock offers a wide variety of taxidermy bird and native species displays where people of all ages are welcome to learn about nature and animals.
Overall
Ranya Zhang and William Xue left the meeting with several new insights and ideas, and are eager to continue working closely with YSI and to maintain ongoing communication between CPMentorship’s Wellness Committee and YSI.
