This week the cool fall air has swept into Minnesota and for many of us that means it’s “back to school” time. Though, back to school is looking very different this year. In fact, very little has been the same for us at Spark-Y in 2020 -- as many can relate.

Through a global pandemic shutdown and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (our statement here), we as an organization are committed more than ever to showing up, listening to the needs of our partners, community, and youth, and doing our utmost to evolve our work in response. We are incredibly proud of our staff and our board, who have risen to the occasion at every step.

Over the last six months we have navigated many unknowns and witnessed many hardships on the communities we serve. Likewise, we have had the opportunity to experience so many bright moments -- including the tremendous support for moving our annual May Plant Sale online with curbside pickup, distributing 750 free Virtual Victory Gardens along with how-to gardening videos to the Northside Minneapolis community sponsored by the African American Community Response Team, creating online resources for our youth to continue hands-on learning at home, and our ongoing work at a memorial garden for George Floyd at 38th and Floyd as well as other beautification projects to areas in the Twin Cities impacted by riots.

As our organization gears up for what will be our most unique year of school programming, we wanted to take a look back over the last few months and highlight a few more of these bright spots:

2020 Annual Summer Internship and Open House
This year’s Annual Summer Internship was scaled from our typical thirty or more interns to nine to comply with social distancing protocol. While small, this group was mighty! Two teams completed sustainable projects throughout the Twin Cities, including a soil kiosk, rainwater catchment system, and beautification along the Minneapolis Greenway. We celebrated their accomplishments at an outdoor Open House and Facebook livestream (you can check out a video recording of the event on our Facebook page, here.)

African American Community Response Team (AACRT)
Established early spring 2020, the Africian American Community Response Team was formed to provide leadership and support for the Northside Minneapolis Community in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a partner to AACRT, Spark-Y has worked to provide 750 free Victory Gardens, including a manual, and online resources at the start of this year’s growing season to combat food insecurity and provide at-home, hands-on education to youth.

Get On The Bus (GOTB)
Spark-Y partnered with AACRT for their Get On The Bus program, where young people are provided access to technology and a safe learning environment on buses. Spark-Y offered socially distant STEM activities to youth through the program. Read more about our work with GOTB in a recent blog post, here.

Spark-Y Receives Environmental Initiative Award
Spark-Y received a 2020 Environmental Initiative Award for our partnership with Edison High School Green Campus: “We chose this project because it invests in future leaders regardless of race, gender, and income by providing hands on life learning experience inside and outside of classroom, it focuses on working on and becoming prepared for real world environmental problems and searching for solutions, and is replicable to other schools/community programs.”

Executive Director, Zach Robinson, named 2020 Rising Young Professional
Our Executive Director, Zach Robinson, was honored as a Finance & Commerce 2020 Rising Young Professional for his leadership at Spark-Y. We as an organization applaud his efforts and congratulate him on this prestigious award!

Spark-Y welcomes Education Director, Katarina (Kata) Rolf
In August we welcomed Kata as Spark-Y’s Education Director. Her ability to see the big picture and air-traffic-control our day-to-day operations for our mission has already made a big improvement in our organization. Kata comes to Spark-Y with a wealth of experience and passion, specifically in human-centered design and education justice. Welcome aboard, Kata!

We at Spark-Y want to thank our partners, volunteers, youth, and communities we serve for all of their efforts and continued resilience during these unprecedented times. Let’s keep looking for the bright spots.

We are in an unprecedented time with countless community spaces and resources shutting down or providing limited resources due to the novel coronavirus. Perhaps the most notable of the closings in March being schools. Students of all ages have been staying home and learning with limited resources for the past 5 months.

Spark-Y partnered with the African American Community Response Team (AARCT) to bring a six week summer learning program to the third to eighth grade students of Best Academy and Friendship Academy/Freedom School. The program is called Get on the Bus (GOTB). It was held at local parks and ran Monday to Thursday from around 9am to 4pm. Buses departed to pick up students at 8:30am with breakfast running from roughly 9am to 9:30am. The Get on the Bus program provided students breakfast, lunch, and a safe way to learn and play.

Our number one priority is the safety of students and staff. As such, students were screened for symptoms of COVID-19 every day before the program as the bus picked them up from home and as they arrived at the program location. Students were expected to keep their masks on both indoors and outdoors.

Students were split into three groups and rotated between three stations: recreation, online learning, and STEM. The curriculum for the outdoor STEM station was coordinated by Spark-Y staff and run by our GOTB interns. Much like our other programs, the curriculum for GOTB is hands-on and sustainability focused. Each week had a theme: renewable energy, water, plants and growing food outside, pollinators, pests, & urban naturalists, vermicomposting & waste, and the science of COVID-19.

During the “pollinators, pests, & urban naturalists” week, the Monday activity was building simplified models of flowers and pollinators using a cup and pipe cleaners. This activity demonstrated how animals help pollen move from plant to plant and which ones are the most effective at doing so.

On Tuesday, students learned about why animals visit and pollinate flowers along with which colors different pollinators are attracted to the most. For example, butterflies are the most attracted to blue or purple flowers and bats are attracted to large, cone shaped flowers. Students were assigned a pollinator and asked to look at data to guess which flower traits their pollinator likes the best. They were then asked to choose from a set of flower pictures and decide which flower their pollinator would like the best.

Students got a little dirty looking for insects on Wednesday with our bug collection activity. After a brief discussion about the habitats of insects our groups went searching for insects with butterfly nets. Each student recorded their observations about the insect’s habitat, appearance, how many legs it had, and any other characteristics they noticed. While collecting insects, one student loved the activity and told us, “When I grow up, I’m definitely going to do this job. I want to do this job!”

Our final activity for the week was building bee houses for mason bees. Although mason bees do not make honey, they are pollinators who make nests in natural holes and cracks. Bee houses for mason bees are versatile. The traditional classroom bee houses are usually made of wood and cut bamboo shoots. Since using power tools at the parks is difficult, the houses were adapted and created using plastic water bottles, rolled paper bags, and string. Students were creative and used paper, sticks, and leaves to decorate the houses and blend into the natural environment. One student in particular was thrilled, “I made the bees a living room so they can hang out in the house! And this big, huge room is where they are going to have dances and parties!”

Written by Patrice Banks - Spark-Y Sustainability Educator

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Finding Bright Spots in 2020

Get On The Bus - A Week in the Life