Farewell AmeriCorps!

Recap of my term with Clark County Green Schools 

As my AmeriCorps term nears its end, I am reflecting on my time with the Clark County Green Schools program. AmeriCorps is a federal program that aims to promote community service and support youth employment around that country. I served this program from Sept. 1, 2023 to July 15, 2024 while working closely with the other Solid Waste Education and Outreach green programs. This has been a very successful term for outreach, and I would like to highlight a few key takeaways from my time here.

A large part of my time at the beginning of this program was spent conducting sort table evaluations in school cafeterias. These were informative experiences to understand more about the program and its needs. From this experience, I decided to take on an extra project to form a webpage using GIS to get more information and resources out to the custodians who run these tables.

During the middle and end of my term, we held two student summits at Clark College. We focused on topics like environmental justice and land use planning to better understand how we are all connected. We collaborated with the Composter Recycler program to bring worm bin lessons into schools and get some worm bin composting started in classrooms. To celebrate food waste prevention week all our programs teamed up to produce a short-series podcast on food waste prevention, which you can still find on our Green Neighbors webpage!

To end my term and the school year, we gathered at assemblies to give out our yearly Green Awards to recipients. Between green team meetings, tabling events, garden tours, and digester composting projects, there is so much more we worked on this term.

I am thankful to my whole Solid Waste Education and Outreach team. Special thanks to Sami Springs LeCain for allowing me to take on increasingly more responsibilities and empowering me to follow what speaks to me – like letting me take the lead on a green team meeting to give a lesson on nature journaling! So fun!

In short, I have had a wonderful time serving Green Schools and our community. I feel I received much more than I gave, and I am so thankful for this experience and every devoted community leader I met along the way. Though bittersweet, I feel ready to start a new chapter and continue to grow professionally.

Thank you for reading and hanging out with me in this blog space for the last 10 months. Wishing you well and signing off…

kalie.morgan@wsu.edu | linkedin.com/in/kaliemorgan