First Step: Resume - Next Step: My Future!

Hi everyone, my name is Jubilee, I am in 10th grade, and I go to Community School of Excellence high school. I am in the Generation Future program with Spark-Y where we meet online and work on learning new skills and becoming leaders to help our futures. I joined Generation Futures because I am focused on learning new expertise to get myself out there. I wanted to learn how to work with a team, learn job skills, and learn communication skills. Spark-Y stood out from all the other after school programs, because we get paid to participate and work together in our session meetings. It also looked challenging and fun!

A couple of weeks ago we worked on building our own draft resumes. We usually start off the sessions with an ice breaker. The week we talked about what we were most grateful for. I said I was most grateful for being able to learn new job skills, meet great staff and peers, and be a leader. Then, we started talking about resumes. I have never done a resume draft or anything like this so when we did make them I was excited and knew it could help out a lot with our real resume later in the year. Something I learned is that when you write a resume you want to make sure that your work experience is up to date. And when you write a resume you want to put down your work experience and skills so that when you apply for a job they can see how far in experience you are and if you qualify for it. I learned that formatting matters too! Spark-Y staff and my own peers helped review my resume and gave me feedback which helped me a lot.

Visual of guidelines on resume review!

When working on a draft resume or any draft it helps your understanding on how to actually write your real resume. In Generation Futures, staff help us work on skills so that it will be more simple and easier for us and also benefit us for our future professional career. Next week, we will be working on our hopes for our future professional career, which will be talking and figuring out what we want our career to be and look like. This helps us be ready and prepared and helps us set our goals on what we want our career to be after high school. I’m very excited to see what else we will start learning and working on because without the Generation Futures program led by Spark-Y it wouldn't be easy to do this alone. Spark-Y has helped me with my leadership, communication skills and job skills that I didn't already know how to express. And it also helped me learn skills that I will use in the future, like how to set good examples for my partners and how to lead others.

Jubilee, 10th Grader in the Generation Future Program

Resume configuration slide

Words Generation Future students contributed about what leadership means to them

Jubilee in the virtual Generation Future classroom

Aquaponic System Build with Oak Hill Montessori

At Spark-Y, we are working with our partners to collectively navigate distance-learning, and at the same time, we recognize the importance of hands-on learning activities that engage the hearts, hands, and minds of young people. With Oak Hill Montessori School returning to in-person learning, we were able to partner with them to give students hands-on experience learning about sustainability and power tools while creating their very own aquaponic system. After creating this system, they will now be able to take care of fish and grow plants right at the school! Of course, all Covid-19 precautions were put into place during this build in order to make this happen as safely as possible. The build was outside, masks were required, and students rotated to stations in small groups. 

Why do we love building aquaponic systems you may ask? Well, it's a great tool to teach concepts such as sustainability, biology, chemistry, math, and much more. Aquaponic systems facilitate a symbiotic relationship between fish and plants. Fish waste adds ammonia to the system. Bacteria then converts the ammonia into nitrites and then nitrates. Plants use nitrates to create proteins for growth, and in return the fish get clean water. It’s an incredible way to grow fresh produce all year long!

Now that we got the biology lesson out of the way, let’s talk about why hands-on learning is so important. First of all, it's fun and engaging. I don't know about you but when I was sitting for a school lecture I often found myself day-dreaming and not soaking in a lot of the information. It is so important to facilitate learning with several senses at once. Young people need room to tinker, make mistakes, and try again. Particularly in the era of Covid, it is important to keep students from getting screen fatigue by adding some hands-on learning opportunities into their curriculum.

Of course, the students at Oak Hill were excited to not only be away from their screens doing hands-on learning, but also to be outside and using tools. They rotated to three stations throughout the day for the build. One station measured dimensions of the wood planks for the tank, another cut the wood, and the last station assembled the aquaponic tank.

While assembling the system, one student, Saphira, said, “I’m excited to have fish we can take care of in our own garden. I am grateful for Spark-Y because we get to have hands-on experience during Covid instead of just studying. It makes school so much more fun.”

Throughout this process, the students had lots of energy because they were so excited about the project. While we love the enthusiasm, I also made the point that in construction projects like this one, efficiency is key. I told them, "if you're not paying attention, you're not being efficient and potentially creating an unsafe environment for your team." To my surprise the students really resonated with that, and one student even started calling out to other students, "that's not efficiency!" whenever other students were goofing around. As time went on more students were yelling, "efficiency!" when they completed a certain task. I really got a kick out of this because in my professional experience my bosses have always harped about efficiency. This is something that was encouraged but never taught in school. This is why hands-on learning is so important to me and many others. Without it we miss the nuances between practice and theory. The aquaponics build was truly a great way for students at Oak Hill to take a break from the screen and learn about aquaponics and sustainability.

Students at Oak Hill Montessori school now have their very own aquaponic system where they can grow produce right at the school. They can now work together to care for their system and continue hands-on learning during Covid and beyond!

Written by Ryland Sorensen - Spark-Y Sustainability Educator

Finding Bright Spots in 2020

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. 

Executive Director, Zach Robinson, prepping Victory Gardens the day before giveaway.

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.)

Internship Open House 2020.

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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!

Kata Wolf

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.

Get On The Bus - A Week in the Life

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.

Photo Credit: Sarah Anderson

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.

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

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!”

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

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!”

Photo Credit: Sophia Osterberg

Written by Patrice Banks - Spark-Y Sustainability Educator