Hello AAMN family,
My name is Megan Smith, and I’m a member of Class 49! I’m happy to have this chance to write for the chapter blog, and am excited to share a bit about myself and my journey in conservation work.
Although I was an Army brat, and lived in several places growing up, I am technically a San Antonio native and have lived the majority of my life here. Upon graduating from college with an environmental degree, I was very uncertain about what my career would or should look like. I often say that I had “vague visions of a cubicle,” because that’s what I pictured when I thought of working or adult life.
During my last year in college, I began hearing about organizations called Conservation Corps. When I was younger, I learned about the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of the Depression era, but I had no idea that a modern equivalent existed. The CCC was a program implemented by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Its purpose was to stimulate the economy by providing millions of jobs to young men (and some women) at various state and national parks throughout the country improving buildings, roads, and general infrastructure, along with other conservation projects to improve America’s landscape.
I became even more interested in working for a conservation corps after making a visit to the headquarters of Texas Conservation Corps in Austin. Several months after that visit, I found myself moved into a small apartment in Austin and about to embark on the adventure of my first “term of service” with Texas Conservation Corps (TXCC). Most conservation corps members serve their terms as part of a conservation crew. For six months, I was a member of Silver Crew, a boisterous band of characters who traveled across Texas and even to a few of the surrounding states.
Our projects included a lot of trail maintenance, from the highly trafficked Greenbelt in Austin to the forested hills of Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas. We restored pocket prairies in Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana and spent a brief disaster deployment filling sandbags to mitigate flooding in Flagstaff, Arizona. We also did a lot of vegetation clearing with chainsaws, which is a particularly iconic and alluring aspect of the conservation corps experience. One location we returned to multiple times to clear vegetation was San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. Working at this national park presented an interesting opportunity to see behind the scenes at a park I had been visiting all my life.
I learned and experienced so much in that first term that I went on to serve as a crew leader on two more terms, one in Colorado with Southwest CC, and another on the first dedicated San Antonio Missions crew. I then went on to be a supervisor for two subsequent iterations of “SAAN Crew,” which was a very short-lived alumni crew in Austin, and also supervised one summer youth crew in San Antonio. During that time as a supervisor, I also dabbled in supervising other types of members called Individual Placements, and today my primary role at TXCC is managing the entire Individual Placements program! IPs are hired alone or in small groups, and they spend the entirety of their terms working at one service site. An IP’s term is more similar to a traditional internship or apprenticeship than to a crew’s term because IPs are embedded into the everyday operations of their host site. TXCC currently has IPs serving terms at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, Big Thicket National Preserve, Sam Houston National Forest, Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana, and De Soto National Forest in Mississippi.
My time working in the conservation corps world has done for me what it does for so many other young people. It has taught me about the world and about myself. I have discovered that there are interesting people everywhere, and that the fields of environmental conservation and stewardship are vast, and criminally under-appreciated for the plethora of valid career opportunities they provide, as well as for the critical services they render for us every day. I have learned that I enjoy teamwork, I have some innate leadership skills, and I enjoy honing them and learning new ones. I’ve learned to be flexible, and to accept the reality that, while 1-year, 5-year, or 10-year life plans are nice, you should count on the fact that things will not go like you’ve planned, and that so much good can come from the unexpected.
I would recommend the conservation corps experience to any young person who wants to explore conservation, land management or another related field, wants to work outside, wants to give back to their community, or who just wants to do something different. No college degree is required to join, only a high school diploma or GED. If there is a young person (18-28 for most programs), please send them my way, or just generally encourage them to explore the option of serving a term on any conservation corps. It could change their life, just like it has changed mine.
If you’d like to learn more about Texas Conservation Corps, I encourage you to go to our website at ayw.org and select Conservation Corps under the Programs tab at the top of the screen. Or, better yet, ask me about TXCC! Talking about conservation corps work is one of my favorite things to do.
There are many resources on the Civilian Conservation Corps, but for a brief explanation, try this youtube video: History Brief: The CCC
Many different conservation corps have evolved since the time of the original CCC. For a list of modern-day conservation corps, follow this link: Find-A-Corps – The Corps Network
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope to share all the knowledge I gain as a Master Naturalist with my current conservation corps members, and I hold an equal amount of excitement about sharing the conservation corps world with all of you!
