The Lake Huron Coastal Centre’s Education Technician, who has been actively involved in delivering the Coastal Conservation Youth Corps program for the last three years, says the program started in 2020, with primary funding from the Provincial Trillium Foundation.
Kerry Kennedy says that funding runs out at the end of this year and she’s hoping they find other grants to keep it going beyond this year.
“The Youth Corps, during the summer, has been a week-long program for high school age participants. It gives them an opportunity to earn a large chunk of volunteer hours while they’re learning about all sorts of coastal topics and coastal stewardship,” said Kennedy. She adds, it also gives them an opportunity to get some hands-on experience and get a feel for what it would be like to work in the environment field.
Kennedy says each day of the week focuses on a different topic and one of them is beach clean-up. She says while they do measure the amount and weight of what they find, that’s not their focus. She says what is just as important is the number of pieces and in particular, the very small pieces.
“This last weekend we were out on the Goderich Main Beach. Maybe over a period of thirty minutes, two hundred cigarette butts, a hundred and twenty food wrappers, so sometimes it isn’t the volume or the mass weight, it’s just the number of little things, said Kennedy.
And she points out, a number of those smaller pieces are plastics, which are found in cigarette filters, and do not decompose very quickly.
Kennedy says they hope they can raise awareness a little bit and she says one of the goals of the Youth Program is that the young people that participate will take some of things they learned with them as they get older.
