Looking back on the year has made me realize how much the Young Adult Conservation Corps program (YACC)
has changed, while keeping and building on the successes of the past. For the
first time since 2006, all YACC staff and participants were together in one
building. With the new building came a fantastic training room that we use
every week to provide job training to our young adults. We welcomed two new
crew leaders, Janessa and Nicole, to our staff, and have been fortified by the
consistency and quality of our other staff:
Matt, Keith, Elliot, Laura, and Charlie. We made a few internal organizational changes to help with crew leader and participant support, and said farewell to Diana (a
YACC supervisor) when she moved to Tree Trust’s Community Forestry Department.
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| Shoveling snow! |
We implemented a new morning stretching routine to get
the blood pumping, and as a program (staff and participants) did about
75,000 pushups. Early in the year, we battled everything Minnesota had to throw
at us shoveling the 5th snowiest winter on record. We completed many
projects for local municipalities, with the crown jewel being an 1100 foot
boardwalk at Westwood Hills Nature Center. Our crews mowed lawns at countless foreclosed homes in
Minneapolis and weekly at five Hennepin County Libraries, and we helped maintain the Midtown
Greenway Corridor. We persevered through the state government shutdown without
having to stop any of our work, thanks in part to the diverse contracts we
service.
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| Boardwalk in Progress |
For all of the new in 2011, I’m still awed by what YACC
does every year. Looking at the property maintained,
construction projects completed, and the amount of tree work accomplished,
I am astonished by the raw numbers. For example, the Westwood Hills
boardwalk required our crews to move over 1 MILLION pounds of lumber…by
hand…through the mud…at least ¼ mile one way!
YACC’s involvement with buckthorn eradication efforts on Hennepin County
Regional Railroad Authority property left a section of trail from Minnetonka to
Chaska buckthorn free. To visualize the 2011 buckthorn
removal quantity, imagine an area that has 60-75 football fields all together.
Now go cut it down one buckthorn tree at a time, then haul each tree up a hill!
As
amazing as these achievements are, what’s more amazing is that our young adult crews
do this type of work day after day after day, learning new skills along the
way, and realizing that to finish any project they have to work as a team to get
the job done. Our staff is amazing, and the positive changes we see in the
youth during their short stop here would not be possible without their
dedication. To all who helped, participated, supported, and funded YACC in
2011, thank you.
–Anders Oredson, Project
Developer & Training Manager
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