Creating a City Level Junior Ranger Program

Welcome to the park leader show where we are changing the landscape of leadership in parks and conservation. I'm your host Jody Mayberry. And joining me for this episode is Sean Underhill, a park ranger with the city of Prescott, Arizona. And Prescott is doing some really neat things that I just thought we needed to talk about, and Sean is just the person to talk about it with. So welcome to the show, Sean. Thank you, Jody. It's a pleasure to be on your show after listening it for

for so long. It's nice to be able to give back and share some of the thoughts and what we're doing here and how others can do the same. Well, that's I love that because that's what we

do this show for is to connect to the park ranger community and park professionals all over the country. And we focus on not national parks, but state parks, county parks, city parks. So it's it's good to find out what other people are doing. And as someone who's listened to the show for a while, hopefully, you've heard that, and you've gotten ideas from other places and other agencies. And it's great to have a chance to talk to you. And you're the 1st park ranger from the city of Prescott to

be on the show. Yes. I've noticed that. And Prescott has a unique set, for its park ranger system and that it's all volunteer except really one position, which is my friend Ellen Bashore, and she's working half paid by the city, half by the school district to do an outdoor learning center, working at our community nature center to provide outdoor programming for the school children within our school

district. And an extension of that has been our Nature Ninos program and others that it's been great for the community, but it's not like a normal even a normal city, park ranger system where you have those enforcing codes and laws. We originally started I think it was 2011. The City of Prescott had volunteer park rangers. It was set up by our Northern Arizona University to do code enforcement. And, you know, that's great and, you know, doing parking

violations. But when you're working with volunteers and you're asking them to go to court, you're not always gonna get people eager or able to do that. And if you're not paying them, it's hard to do. And so we saw it, with Ellen, she's, you know, has a master's in education, saw a way to bring that outdoor learning to students. And as she's progressed, she's increased her, I guess, for lack of a better name, manpower by getting AmeriCorps

volunteers. And there's a great Arizona serve organization that coordinates AmeriCorps volunteers to work at the Nature Center as park rangers. And usually these are college kids working with our Prescott College, which gives them experience. They can put on their resume. Yeah. I did park ranger work. And as they progress and go to other park ranger positions, it helps them out. And it also helps the city out in that you're getting volunteers, but you're also getting, you know, paid eager

people to do the work and reach out to the children. So it's become less of code enforcement and law enforcement to more interpretive ranger work, and it's having a big impact on our city. Well, this is this is fascinating in a couple

of ways. One is what Sean told us about the change from code enforcement to interpretation and the impact it's had. That is definitely one conversation. Another is the city having mostly or almost exclusively volunteer park rangers. I don't think

that is common, so there's another conversation. But before we get to either of those or the topics I specifically thought, oh, I've got to have Sean on to talk about, I have to address one thing and that is so a behind the scenes look at the Park Leader Show is before I interview anybody, I always say, can you pronounce your first and last name for me? As I did with Sean before we started recording. What I did not do is say, can you pronounce the name of your town for me? And I've been saying

Prescott, and clearly, you've heard Sean say Prescott. So I've been saying it wrong all this time. Well, it's a classic way of knowing who lives here and who's visiting. And there's arguments throughout Prescott's history on how to pronounce the name, and you'll see it both ways. But if you're a native or you've lived here for a while, it's pronounced Prescott. Yeah. That's good. I now I've heard it both ways. That reminds me of the show Psych. Have you ever

seen the show Psych? Yes. Great show, and there is a line in there where, well, a running joke where he would say, I've heard it both ways, like, if he pronounced a a word wrong. And then eventually, one time, he said, I've heard it both ways, the right way and then your way, which I I thought that was funny. Alright, Sean. Tell us a little bit about your history with the outdoors and then how you came to be a park ranger with the city of Prescott. You see how quickly I adapted. Yes.

Well, going back to my history is and talking about the right way or the wrong way, I've heard there's the right way, the wrong way and the army way. It's like I have a background in the army. I was military police or even as civilian police for the military for the longest time, got moved up the ranks to an assistant chief. I was even an acting chief for a while back in my hometown of Yuma at the

Yuma Proving Ground. And now as I grew up there in the desert, I always admired park rangers and park ranger work. But if I wanted to get into that there, it'd be working with the Bureau of Land Management and just driving around the desert all day. And I wasn't you know, I did that as law enforcement, but it wasn't something I sought out to do. And my wife, she was a public defender, got an opportunity to move up to

Prescott, where it's a lot cooler than the desert. We have pine forests and a few different environmental areas, a few lakes. It's lots of hiking opportunities. It's a great area. So we moved up here. I became a stay at home dad for about 5 years. And first thing I did was print out the list of all the parks in the area. And I took my kids to every park and we evaluated. We ranked these parks on which one's the best for which features, what time of year to go to these

different parks. And, you know, moving up here, I thought, oh, we're surrounded by the Prescott National Forest. There'll be ranger programs. You know, I'm thinking just like you have with the, you know, the National Park Service, I can take my kids to those. And unfortunately, they're so thin staffed here with the national forest is that those programs don't exist really. And so, you know, that was a little disappointing. There was

no free outdoor programs. And after living here a while, you know, I take my kids out to the forest all the time just to play. And once I had the

opportunity, I used my GI bill and I had to go and I'm like, what do I get my master's in? Something where I can still care for my kids but do part time schoolwork. So I looked at Parks and Recreation Management. It was a good one, a good field to get into different from law enforcement, but still getting out there in the woods, helping people out. And I had to pick a program for my master's degree. I looked at Leave No Trace, and I noticed that our neighboring national forest was a gold

standard site. So I reached out to our forest because I take my kids to these dispersed campsites. And as they play in the dirt, there's broken glass, stuff burned in the burn pits that's not supposed to be there and, you know, damage to the trees. I'm like, how can I fix this? So I was thinking putting Leave No Trace signs at all the campsites. But as I got more into the program, after my 1st year, I did, you know, a year's worth of research on Leave No Trace. Signs don't do

much. A lot of the signs end up being shot up. And but educational programs where you're actually talking to people, they're the most effective in changing behaviors. So along with, you know, research leaning that way, after my 1st year of the program, it's only a 2 year program, was looking into internships. You know, could I volunteer with the forest service? But then, you know, looking on the AmeriCorps, the Arizona SERVE website, I noticed there was a park ranger position at our

community nature center. And I had actually gone there with the program for my daughter, and I met Ellen Bashore and her other rangers there, and they were doing great work for the city. And I'm like, I didn't even know the city had park rangers. So I volunteered with them, and Ellen was doing research into a junior ranger program, but just gathering materials. And I'm like, I wanna take

this on. And so I started you know, I took all that research, you know, all that time I spent going to all those different parks, all that research on leave no trace. I'm like, I can design a park a junior ranger program around leave no trace with Arizona specific appreciate AZ version of it and get all that information from the parks into a junior ranger book. So the junior ranger book I created, if you just search Prescott

Junior Rangers, you can download it for free. It's bilingual, and it has a map of the city, but so it highlights all of those parks, open space. And I also did a lot of research into the history of the city. So it has a timeline game of the entire history from a 1000000 years ago. There's a dormant, well, extinct volcano in the center of town, between

here and Prescott Valley. And it was just a way to give back to the community, highlight these issues, and add on to the programs that the rangers who were there were already doing with Nature Ninos. They started that up. I got into it about a year into the program and now it's on its 4th year and we've just been continuing to expand it because it

targets ages 0 to 8. And really, you think it's for the kids, but it's also for the parents to get them information, to let them know that even with an infant, you can safely take kids outdoors and just introduce them to other organizations that serve families. So we've LN partnered with Community Health Services and which I also work for now. And you have our University of Arizona Cooperative Extension for Yavapaya County. And they were the original

startup for Nature Ninos. And now it has a bunch of different other organizations that serve families and they participate, they come out, they do different booths, they provide, you know, scavenger hunts, arts and crafts, all nature based and encouraging parents to get outdoors. And the key is we make it free. We do a different park each month, just 2 hours on a Saturday, and it gets people outdoors to parks they may not have gone to before. A lot of

them are like, I've never been to this park. I didn't know it had these features. We highlight if it has ADA features. And, you know, also while I was designing the Junior Ranger book, I worked with the National League of Cities, Cities Connecting Children to Nature, to do an equity study of all of our parks using GIS mapping. And so as we would go to all these different parks, we highlighted that, hey, with a simple ramp, this bathroom would be more accessible. Or if we

put a path here, it would be more accessible, not just to a wheelchair person, but strollers that families are using or, you know, add lighting to make it safer. We make sure that wherever we do a Nature Ninos event, that the trails are safe for children so that they don't trip, hurt themselves. We make sure there's no trash around and glass that could hurt

them. So that's a safe environment and parents feel safe coming out there, introducing their families to nature because on their own, it's like if I have an infant, I don't want to go out into the woods. But if I'm with a group of others and professionals who are trained in education and safety, they're more willing. And we get a lot of repeat people, but we also get a lot of new people every year, every month. So it averages about 150 people at an event.

Sometimes we've had over 300, but we try to keep it around 150. So, you know, that much people in one location isn't always good for a park area. So I volunteered as AmeriCorps for 1 year. Once I got my master's, I moved on to work for county health. I continued as a volunteer for the

park rangers to help manage the junior ranger program. And I also got on with the Leave No Trace organization as the state advocate for Arizona to be able to reach out further within the state, let others know about these programs, and also gives me resources for these events to provide Leave No Trace handouts, but also, to help others around the state So they can contact me and I can

send them booth kits for Leave No Trace. Let them just continue to spread the message and, see where we can continue to provide these free activities for families that they really need. When you created the Junior Ranger program, the part that I'm interested in is the idea of creating it for a city as opposed to a park that where it's focused just on one park and maybe it's a big park with a lot of property and so it's easy to

create a program there. What is the key to a successful city level junior ranger program as opposed to one for a larger park? Yeah. That's one thing that I didn't touch on is what makes this program unique is that well, not unique. Other programs have passports. Our state parks have a passport to each state park, but you have to go all around the whole state. For ours, I made a passport on it for organizations within the city, our museums, our, you know, libraries,

just places that are family friendly. So that as a family, a parent takes this Junior Ranger book, they'll open it up, they'll see the passport, and there's about 20 different organizations on there. They only have to visit 7 of them. 1, to lead into their 7 Leave No Trace principles. But also if somebody is just visiting on a weekend, yeah, I can do 7 of these. A lot of them are in their downtown area. Now there's some specialty toy shops that do some local businesses.

We have a few different museums, our Museum of Indigenous People, our Charlotte Hall Museum highlights the territorial history of the area. And we even have a planetarium. So we just have people go to these different organizations. They get a stamp and then they can return to our downtown visitor center or recreation services and they get a junior ranger badge. It's a wooden badge, you know, sustainably sourced wood. And it's

something that people can feel they can earn, accomplish. They can be done in a weekend or over summer. When I initially came out with it, I had it distributed through our library summer reading program. I worked with our tourism office to get Appreciate AZ funds to print the initial 1,000 booklets and buy the badges. And really that's anybody can do that. You just need somebody willing, you know, with some graphic design skills. I use the

Canva program. It's pretty common with a lot of organizations, but any program you can design it in and you just look at, you know, I looked at other city and, you know, state, federal junior ranger programs. We collected all the information we wanted and made it specific to our area. And that's why a lot of people like it because it

is specific to this city. And you get those that historical aspect, that his cultural, the ecology of the area, learning about the specific animals and plants that are within the city that you'll see in your backyard. And it also, you know, with that, makes people more aware, makes those living here more aware of what's around them. And as visitors come here, they appreciate Prescott more because they have a quick

resource to learn about it. How many families that do the junior ranger program say Prescott and how many say Prescott? Or another way to ask it, how many families that do the junior ranger program are from out of the area and how many are from in the area? Well, that's one thing that is difficult to say because, you know, we print those 1,000 books, and within a year, they were gone. We also do a annual Earth Day festival

where we give them out. And the thing with making them free to download online is it's hard to tell who's getting these books. I remember talking to our library, one of our librarians, and she said there was a lady who was having trouble printing something. And when she asked her what she was printing, she's like, oh, the Junior Ranger book. And she said, fortunately, she had copies that I had given her. So she's like, here, you can have a copy. And and she was from a city that was, you

know, 50 miles away. They were just visiting and they wanted to

go through the program. We get a lot from our Phoenix area, which is, you know, a 100 miles away. They come up to get Escape the Heat and, you know, go through this program. Hard to get statistics on that, but we have say roughly 2,000 who have gone through the book so far and we have plenty of badges available. I even had some printed in Spanish if anybody wanted those versions, but I made sure to get it translated into Spanish as that was the most common

secondary language in the area. And, you know, if I have time, we'll continue to do more, but I've been making sure it gets updated periodically as we get other organizations that are coming up. We have one new Nature Ninos partner. That's a friend who's working on starting up a science and engineering, you know, a STEM activity center here in town. So now she gets to promote for free at our events. You know, it gives us that extra

aspect of providing STEM activities. And our organization's called Yes with an exclamation point, Yavapai Exploration and Science. And it's a good starting point for people to promote their organizations. We promote for them And, you know, with our junior ranger partners, I don't ask any of them for financing. I just say, hey, are you family friendly? Can you provide these tools to families to better their situations? And if so, then you can be part of

our program. Tell us a little about the Nature Ninos program. Yeah. Again, it was started with just a few small organizations, and it's nice that every year we have a meeting. We get with all of these with our city, with surrounding cities, with the Forest Service, and we work out which parks we're going to highlight based on the time of year because some parts of Prescott gets snow, some don't. And we select one for each month. And then we also add our Earth Day event so

that we're not doing the same every year. We're providing a different location for families to go to, but also those that are within this area so that people aren't driving too far. We try to make them accessible, you know, with their locations, with those who may be on, you know, working on different disabilities. We try to provide our locations to be ADA friendly, if not compliant, which Prescott's working towards. Again, my friend, Park Ranger Ellen,

she has gotten ADA trail put in at the Nature Center and that has helped out a lot. We have new paths from in our lake areas, from the parking lot down to the fishing dock, which didn't originally exist. And so just, you know, small little things to make access to these parks. As we do these events, we notice that, you know, some of our parks may be

lacking in certain areas. So we work to fix that with the city and the city's fully on board with that, with our recreation staff, our, you know, city planners or city managers. And they all want to improve this area and provide these outdoor programs. So, you know, our council members, even one of our council members, he runs a local birding shop called Lookout and he helped pay for and I donated $1,000 so I could print

750 more books to cover another year. And so, you know, we're running on a very little budget, but we're able to get it done because we have dedicated volunteers and a community that wants these programs and needs them. As you know, there's a lot of outdoor programs in the area, but it's not always affordable. I have a girl in girl scouts and she loves it and we can afford it, but some people can't afford those programs. And so we provide an alternative

to keep people involved. And we actually have Girl Scouts volunteer and they come out and they do a booth and they have their scout volunteers. And it's great to be able to give back. And, you know, with the scout, you're supposed to do community events and provide outreach events. So it gives an outlet for children to do these booths. And like I said, my kids as junior rangers, they're running their own activity booths

as well. Either my son doing his amphibian station and it's always packed with parents and kids and he's letting them know that, you know, certain things that they thought were amphibians or reptiles and vice versa. And people are eager to learn. Kids are eager to learn from their peers. And, you know, this past Nature Ninos, there was a stage at the park. And so we brought animal based costumes and the kids and the volunteers put

on a show for the parents. So all the kids that showed up to just attend the event got to be in the show and we get them involved in nature. And since the previous event was, Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, we focused on decomposers. My son was dressed as a cockroach. And it's just, you know, trying to put different themes on what our events are so that they're memorable. Kids get to take them. You know, they build something with the activity stations, arts and crafts that they can take

home. There's healthy snacks. Our community health services work through AZ Health Zone grant. And so we're always encouraging healthy activity to get outdoors as highlighting that the physical and mental health aspects of it that benefit the children, they benefit the adults participating so that we can, you know, focus better at school, focus better at our job, be a little less stressed as you know, nature

does that without having to take any meds. And all you gotta do is go outdoors, and we can do it safely with these programs.

Well, this has been a great conversation because what you do in Prescott actually makes a difference in Zion National Park and Glacier National Park because we have to introduce people to the nature that's around them if they're ever going to be concerned enough with it to vote for conservation, to get involved in conservation, to care whether or not we have large natural spaces protected.

It all begins in our backyard. And you are doing great work, Sean, to make sure that the children and the families in Prescott know what's around them, fall in love with what what is around them, and are curious enough to want to protect it everywhere. So I love hearing these stories about the work that you're doing. Well, I truly appreciate it, and I love the continuing to hear your other guests and learn what they have to offer to improve upon these

programs as well. Well, great. So if someone wants to see more about what you're doing in Prescott, learn about the junior ranger program, Nature Ninos, where can we go to find out more? They can just look on our city website. Just, you know, do a search for Prescott Nature Ninos or Prescott Junior Rangers, and you can pull up our schedules. You can download the guidebook for free. Or if you're in the area, you can pick up a copy at our visitor center or recreation services and go

through the program, join us. And I give out copies of the guidebook at our Nature for Nino's events, and you can earn your own Prescott Junior Ranger badge. Alright. Thank you so much for being with us, Sean, and thank you for listening to the Park Leaders Show.