Each year, Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA) facilitates summer programs with youth – one of which is our well-loved Environmental Justice Program!
DNDA’s Environmental Justice (EJ) program has been running since 2019, with each iteration of the program based around getting local teenagers outside, predominately teens who live in the neighborhoods of High Point and Delridge. The EJ program provides teens with a dedicated program and paid internship opportunity to engage with local urban parks and community spaces. DNDA’s staff facilitates hands-on learning and engaging conversations to delve into environmental justice issues in our area, as well as empowering the teens to take community action to change our local spaces and environment for future thriving. For many teen interns, this is a first or early stage gaining employment and being in a professional environment as well as an important time engaging in both learning and contributing to their community.
This year looked a little different from years before — we ran programs at High Point, which allowed us to be collaborative with both DNDA’s Summer Youth Program (SYP) and with the Neighborhood House’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). We had a few sessions where the teens were learning and engaged in helping our neighborhood together, which resulted in a strong sense of community and connectedness.
Our five-person EJ cohort gathered over the course of five weeks together, from July to August. We learned more about our local watershed, water quality and stormwater management, the importance of beavers and salmon, and food justice. In our first week together, we got to know each other and shared what we love about High Point. We also started to cover how High Point is a good model of community response to environmental justice challenges by adding bioswales, a retention pond, permeable pavement, and lining streets and homes with plants. We added more to our conversation about water bodies and water quality by taking a field trip to Longfellow Creek. Our youth learned more about how Longfellow Creek is impacted by pollution from roads, houses, and industrial spaces and how that has contributed to water quality. DNDA staff had youth participate in water quality monitoring and check the pH, dissolved oxygen level, temperature, and coloiform bacteria levels at one Longfellow Creek location.
Later in our program, youth mapped how and where the neighborhood had access to resources that helped our community be climate and food resilient, as well as any places or areas that might not be accessible. We found that High Point was well-resourced in terms of trees to help shade sidewalks and road ways and food access in our area. Some access notes that might be challenging were that there wasn’t a lot of access to fresh food, and there were more “fast food” options than nutritious food or culturally relevant foods. We talked about mitigating these challenges by growing our own food, talking to the city about sidewalk fixes, and more transportation access (buses) to help people move around and started enacting more access to food by planting some more types of food in our community garden area.
In the program, we also talked more about our local history, looking at changes to space from past to our current urban environment and how ecosystems and water have transformed over time. Our field trip to the Duwamish River with the River Access Paddle Program enabled our youth to see in person how industry and pollution are impacting the river. We practiced ways to be water protectors in High Point neighborhood by picking up trash as youth walked or moved around in different directions. Later after collecting trash, the youth worked with DNDA Teaching Artist Erin Kollar learning how to turn trash into art as a practice of transformation and creativity.
Throughout the program, we also got to work in collaboration not just across our youth programs of EJ, SYP, and SYEP – we also got a chance to engage with local and state organizations and agencies. This included a stormwater tour of High Point with Seattle Public Utilities between all three youth programs, as well as a time for the Environmental Justice interns to learn more about green stormwater infrastructure systems in an engaging activity called “Rain Drop Run” where the teens were tasked to find the slowest route possible to help to clean polluted water in systems like bioswales, permeable pavement, and raingardens. We also worked with external partners to do a zine workshop, and with the High Point Library to provide a resume and cover letter workshop to our teens in our SYEP and EJ program. Further collaboration happened when our youth in the EJ and SYEP program harvested chives and sweet potato greens and brought them to our SYP cooking Program, and we worked to add the greens to burgers and chives were added to fries – so delicious!
Community connections happened beyond High Point as well – a favorite beyond kayaking was when our environmental justice program got to connect to Pamela Adams, a local beaver investigator, and Tom Resse, a photographer of local waterways and salmon. Tom and Pamela shared their knowledge about the importance of beavers in our community ecosystems and the salmon’s journey between the Duwamish River and Longfellow Creek. Our interns got to see Pamela’s footage of beavers working along the creek, and evidence about how they’ve worked to set up areas where salmon are welcomed to spawn their eggs and continue their life as fry in clear and cool water that the damming of beavers has helped to create in Longfellow Creek. Tom showed us some areas where salmon fry and smolt (young salmon) have taken shelter and are receiving important food that will allow them to continue growing and took some amazing underwater photos of the fry under a log that a beaver had felled!
At the end of the program, the environmental justice youth compiled what they learned about into a community resource together as part of their community action project. Each teen intern worked on at least one page where they contributed to sharing more about local issues in our community, about what we learned about waterways of Longfellow Creek and the Duwamish River, and what we want to see in our future to create healthy environments and a thriving future for all of us. We turned these pages, along with artwork from the teen interns and DNDA Staff into a zine which we printed and handed out to our family, neighbors, and community on our last day of programs.
We offer huge gratitude to our five teen cohort members for their time, energy, and presence in our community and for their participation in the 2025 Environmental Justice cohort! DNDA and our Environmental Justice program leader Jules Hepp would like to thank all our community collaborators this year: the River Access Paddle Program, High Point Neighborhood House, Seattle Housing Authority, DNDA’s Art Team and Erin Kollar (DNDA’s Teaching Artist), the Beacon Food Forest, City Fruit, High Point Library, Seattle Public Utilities, Tom Reese, and Pamela Adams for being such a vital part of a successful program! We also want to acknowledge all the funders who made the program possible such as: BECU, Rose Foundation, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, King County WRIA 9, Seattle Parks, West Seattle Garden Tour, Philanthropy Northwest, and King County Wastewater Treatment.
-Written by DNDA’s Environmental Education Coordinator Jules Hepp
