CNRE seniors encourage careers in conservation with Humble Hikes

Humble Hikes is an organization from Roanoke, they work with inner city black or BIPOC communities, specifically youth. It's a part of Humble Hustle. So the whole goal of Humble Hustle is to empower those black youth. Humble Hikes helps to expose them to the outdoors, to natural resources, to the environment, and just make sure they feel comfortable doing that and hopefully foster like some sort of passion for it. This event here is sort of like our Earth Day Palooza event for the students. We brought them on our campus. And we have all these different stations set up that sort of encapsulate all the different ways that we work with wildlife. One of the stations is a nature journaling stations. So each student gets a cutesy little journal and then they can trace the transfer paper. We have leaves, pine cones, there are also field guides there so they can draw. We have markers and stickers and stamps. We also have a bird station where people can go and watch some birds and record what they see. The macro invertebrate station is going to be, we're digging in the stream. We're looking for little stone flies, crayfish, little bugs. They reached out to Humble Hustle to create this event today on the behalf of their senior capstone project. And it's been very important to see other youth giving back to younger youth because then that's instilling that inspiring hope. To have them here today digging in dirt, whether it is digging in dirt and looking in the water, looking through microscopes, whatever that may look like. We're excited to have them here because they're continuing to widen their horizons in various ways. And this is just another opportunity for them to figure out, hey, is this for me ? When you're exposed to this field at a very young age, that's really what garners your passion for it. And so kind of going above and beyond just today. In general, it's really important to increase diversity in the field and inclusion. Make sure that once people are going to these events, they're feeling welcomed and invited. To be able to explain and excite students about those sorts of topics that I already have a passion for, I think is super important. Kids at this age, like the middle school age, don't really know what they're doing or where they wanna go. So to be able to give them an inside look in our major and the things that we do everyday life, whether it's in the classroom or outside of the classroom. I think it's super important just to give them the potential to see themselves doing this at sometime in the future.