11 Jul My Project: Latino Conservation Week Communications

In my previous blog post, I shared a photo of myself working on something for Latino Conservation Week (LCW), a yearly celebration to highlight the role of the Latino community in environmental stewardship. Continuing the tradition, the main goal of my internship is to plan National Park Service (NPS) communications products that will be published for LCW, which runs for nine days from July 16 through July 24. Priorities include internal as well as external content.

Enjoying public lands while simultaneously thinking about ways to engage people in Latino Conservation Week.

Let’s start with internal examples. I wrote a guidance page for the internal agency website, InsideNPS, to teach employees about LCW and to get them excited for it. During a call attended by a large portion of NPS staff, I explained further about the occasion and encouraged peopler to get involved by planning fun events such as Spanish-language tours of public lands led by park rangers. I added a personal touch by generating an article about what LCW means to me, as a Latino youth first introduced to public lands as a Cub Scout. Flashing forward about two decades, it was on a work trip to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in 2021 with the Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program (RTCA) of the NPS when an idea in my mind came to the forefront—Latino folks such as myself can and should be a part of protecting public natural and cultural resources, perhaps even as a potential and certainly rewarding career.

Taking in the vast expanse of the mountains in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve on a trip to Alaska in 2021.

As for external communications, I will be collecting thoughts from fellow LHIP interns about the importance of conservation and what they are doing in their jobs to achieve that goal. Spotlighting them could take the form of social media posts or articles for the public NPS.gov website.

Bye for now!