Plains Youth InterACTION, serving the endangered 2,000 acre Fort Worth Prairie Park and surrounding ecosystem:
Help 1000 school kids from various economic and ethnic backgrounds visit and work on the Fort Worth Prairie Park during the 2011 – 2012 school year! Youth who rarely get to interact will mingle and work together to save the Prairie.
Plains Youth InterACTION engages our children in discovering the values of leadership and personal responsibility for their own health, their life’s direction and their environment. They “heal themselves through healing the Earth (the prairie).” The active process of hands-on ecological restoration and protection is threaded into self restoration and protection so both are healed at the same time, and deeper, richer, healthier lives are engendered.
Some of the most impacted kids work to heal some of Texas’ most impacted prairies and plains.
Plains Youth InterACTION allows North Texas inner city youth to become “ecosystem participants,” which is defined as new Ecological Health leaders.
Rehabilitation of native ecosystems and individuals through:
- hands-on ecological restoration work
- skills-building
- personal leadership processing
- social work support
- deep immersion into wild nature; especially the hand’s on act of protecting and restoring wild nature
- an understanding of the similar threats to self and Earth
- integrated health education regarding self and Earth
- personal action and responsibility for tangibly healing self and Earth
The Fort Worth Prairie Park is serving as the living ecosystem through which our Fort Worth youth, through Plains Youth InterACTION, have stabilized problems associated with:
- HIV/AIDS
- Depression and despair
- Education deficit
- Anger
- Apathy
- Grief
- Trauma
- Conflict
- Self-confidence and esteem
- Personal responsibility
- Domestic violence
- Desperation leading to criminal behavior
- Injury
- Health and wellness
- Communication
- Ecological & social belonging
We have reduced recidivism, improved health, provided a track way to college, and helped save 2,000 acres of the rarest major ecosystem in North America, a Southern component of the North American Tallgrass Prairie. And we have allowed many kids to have fun and interact with other kids like never before!
