The Nature Conservancy. Protecting nature. Preserving life.™

LEAF interns in Georgia © Sherry Crawley/TNC

This year’s LEAF interns enjoyed many firsts. For intern Brandon Latorre from New York it was seeing stars like never before during a nighttime beach walk on Sapelo Island. For Albert Leda from New York, it was canoeing for the first time. And for Joshua McCloud from Georgia, he enjoyed feeling ocean waves on his feet for the first time.

Read more about LEAF
Read about this year's Georgia LEAF interns in the New York Times.

Put down the iPhone.

Could you turn down a month-long, paid internship, helping protect a beautiful forest? But there’s a catch: you have to give up your computer. And TV. And iPod.

Now imagine you are a teenager. Today, kids 8-18 years old devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes using entertainment media in a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).*

“We can’t assume that kids today are chasing fireflies or playing in the snow,” said Brigitte Griswold, director of youth programs for The Nature Conservancy. “If we value clean air and water, parks and wild places for recreation and the many benefits we get from protecting our natural resources, we have to actively cultivate the next generation of people who will care for our world.”

The Nature Conservancy’s Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future (LEAF) program tackles this challenge. For 18 years, the program has pulled kids from environmental high schools away from laptops and video games and sent them outside.

Peach LEAFs

Thanks to generous support from the Toyota USA Foundation, fourteen students from Arabia Mountain High, an environmentally-focused public school in suburban DeKalb County, Georgia, will be a part of this year’s LEAF class.

Packing plenty of bug spray and sturdy boots, these lucky kids set off in July for a grand adventure:

• Four girls traveled to the Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida to build fences and look for red-cockaded woodpeckers;
• Three guys went to Block Island Preserve in Rhode Island to test water quality and remove invasive plants;
  
• North Dakota was the destination for four young women, where they looked for piping plover nests and helped maintain preserves;
  
• and three young men stayed here in Georgia and were joined by three guys from New York. They worked at Moody Forest near Baxley and on the Georgia coast.

About the LEAF Program

The LEAF program is designed to engage urban youth in conservation activities now so that they will become leaders and stewards for our planet tomorrow. The program also supports teachers at partner environmental high schools by providing professional development.

Students apply and compete for this life-changing work and educational experience, which is designed to enhance classroom knowledge while exposing students to careers in the emerging green economy. Participating schools have been recognized by the Department of Education as schools that save energy, reduce costs and exemplify environmentally sustainable learning spaces and educational programs to boost academic achievement and community engagement.

The LEAF experience has influenced its alumni to go from the comfortable life of their city block to pursue projects in the Amazon rainforest, hike the world’s highest peaks and find careers in sustainable urban planning—all things that would never have been thought possible without their eye-opening internship with this program.

Over 34 percent of LEAF alumni go on to pursue professional paths in environmental fields, and over 50 percent go on to volunteer for environmental causes in their communities.

This comprehensive environmental-leadership program for teenagers and their educators now serves approximately 20 environmental high schools in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Connecticut and Georgia.

Learn more about the students that LEAF serves, the Toyota USA Foundation—the program’s lead supporter—and this unique partnership model.