YMCA Partnership

Young campers’ responses help evaluate climate change curricula

Campers at Jamaica Wildlife Bay Refuge within Gateway National Recreation Area in New York. A YMCA partnership there is evaluating climate change curricula.

YMCA of Greater New York

Over the past 10 years, the National Park Service and the YMCA have partnered to connect more than 100,000 young people from 21 Ys across the nation to 65 national parks and historic sites through summer day camp programs.

The program connects local youth with the parks. It promotes the ecological benefits of volunteer services projects and the health benefits of outdoor recreation. Volunteer projects, mostly for the older campers, include trail maintenance, community garden work, and basic park upkeep. Recreation opportunities, for all ages, include fishing, swimming, kayaking, and hiking.

This year, 14 YMCAs in the NPS partnership are testing at least four existing climate change curricula. Some curricula explore urban “heat islands” and the importance of shady green spaces in cities. Others explore the effects of climate change on rural areas and NPS lands. Some are appropriate for elementary-age kids, others for high schoolers.

The goal of the testing is to develop a comparison tool that YMCAs inside and outside the NPS partnership can use to determine which curriculum is best for their local specialized needs.

“The Y serves over 9 million youth and teens a year. We have tremendous summer camp, day camp, and resident camp programming,” says Jennifer Gilburg, the Y-USA’s project lead for the NPS partnership. “This type of curriculum is a resource that we’ll be able to share more broadly for Ys across the country to consider integrating into their existing programming.”

YMCA camp Student Conservation Association intern Claire “Twig” Adams says climate change is “something that's really important for the younger generation to be learning right now because it is happening right now.”

Gateway Region YMCA

Claire “Twig” Adams is a Student Conservation Association intern based at the Gateway Region YMCA in St. Louis. Adams tested a curriculum called Project WET (Water Education for Teachers). While taking young campers to public lands along the Mississippi River — including Gateway Arch National Park and Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park — Adams recorded the kids’ responses to the curriculum, which focuses on climate’s effects on water. Analysis of those responses by Adams will help inform the future direction of the curriculum.

“I noticed that once we got into the nitty-gritty of these lessons, they were really focusing and really engaging,” Adams says of the YMCA campers. “For me, it's all about seeing the real-time turnaround of not only the campers’ learning about climate change but their connection to public lands in general.”

Adams helps YMCA campers explore waters along the Mississippi River near St. Louis.

Gateway Region YMCA

The NPS lead for the program, Ernestine White, sees the YMCA as an ideal conservation partner. "They’re embedded in communities,” she says. “They have access to the people that we want to engage” regarding the value of national parks and the importance of making them climate resilient.

The YMCA Partnership is one of five youth and young adult programs supported by the Inflation Reduction Act that help fortify NPS sites in the face of a changing climate. The other four are the Community Volunteer Ambassador Climate Cohort, Scientists in Parks, Landscape Stewardship Corps, and the Pacific Islands Conservation Corps.

Learn more about the YMCA partnership.

About the Inflation Reduction Act

The Inflation Reduction Act provides the National Park Service with an historic opportunity to address critical ecosystem resilience, restoration, and environmental planning needs. Projects funded in national parks represent broad-scale and impactful resource investments across every corner of our nation—from Alaska to Florida to Maine. 

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