Green Jobs Take Youth Miles High
When La’Kyla Byrd cleared trails and tended to trees in Denver’s City Park this past year as a member of Mile High Youth Corps, she also cleared a path for herself and three siblings out of the violent and drug-infested neighborhood of their childhood into college and service-oriented futures.
When La’Kyla Byrd cleared trails and tended to trees in Denver’s City Park this past year as a member of Mile High Youth Corps, she also cleared a path for herself and three siblings out of the violent and drug-infested neighborhood of their childhood into college and service-oriented futures. Mile High Youth Corps’ effectiveness in forging green pathways out of poverty may be why the Corporation for National Service awarded it more than $832,831 to expand its own and help five other Youth Corps programs around Colorado. Denver-based Mile High Youth Corps (MHYC) places 150 youth each year into green jobs in land and water conservation, energy-efficiency, and construction. It creates leaders out of many of them, such as La’Kyla, who led a conservation crew and will teach a GED class next season.
“I definitely want to keep community service as part of my life,” said the 21-year-old who steered her three younger siblings into MHYC programs and its GED classes. “I’ve seen the harm, the problems in our community,” she said. “I didn’t want us to go in that direction.” Kelly Causey, MHYC’s executive director, said such successes may be why the Corps has received indications that it will be selected for at least some of the five grant programs to which it applied. “We have a track record for delivering on our performance measures so they seem to be confident that they can count on us to fulfill the goals,” Causey said of the Recovery grants decision makers. “Also, we meet several Stimulus goals at one time - green jobs training, employment, serving various youth populations targeted by the funding.”
