Community Volunteer Ambassadors

Climate interns help lead the way for parks and the planet

As members of the National Park Service Community Volunteer Ambassador (CVA) program’s first climate cohort, Darien Parris-Austin and Pearse Meighan are pioneers.

The cohort consists of 10 interns nationwide who are working for 48 weeks to support climate resilience and education work at National Park sites. Their primary duty is to encourage local residents, particularly young people, to volunteer for climate-resilience-related projects in the park. The interns also lead educational outings that stress hard science and traditional ecological knowledge.

“This is incredibly important for the National Park Service because we’ve been charged by Congress to protect these [natural and cultural] resources, and climate is one of the many vulnerabilities we have to address in order to do that,” says NPS Volunteers-In-Parks program manager Shari Orr. Orr oversees the cohort, which is largely funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and supported by Conservative Legacy and AmeriCorps.

”The program is unique to every intern,” says Darien Parris-Austin, a CVA climate cohort intern at Saguaro National Park in Arizona. “We're all facing these challenges in really different ways.”

NPS

Close to Home in Arizona

Parris-Austin is working at Saguaro National Park in Arizona — a few miles from where she grew up.

There are two major climate concerns at the park, according to biologist Don Swann, who supervises Parris-Austin. The first is that warmer winters are drying out soils, thus threatening saguaro cactus seedlings’ survival. The second concern is increased desert wildfires fueled by invasive buffelgrass. Fire kills saguaro cactus.

Parris-Austin helps train and direct volunteers in citizen science projects like monitoring saguaro cactus, mapping invasive species, and building wildlife-friendly fencing. She also is part of team working with Tohono O’odham tribespeople, on whose ancestral homeland the park sits and for whom the saguaro cactus is a revered resource. She helps welcome local high school groups and interns from Mexico, too.

“Bringing diverse groups into the outdoors and allowing them to cultivate a deep personal relationship with the land” is essential to addressing climate change, Parris-Austin says.

“This isn't your average internship. You have to be passionate, personable, committed and driven,” says Pearse Meighan, a CVA climate cohort intern at NPS sites in the Virgin Islands.

NPS

Outside the Box in the Caribbean

Pearse Meighan is based half a continent and hundreds of miles of open sea water away from his Wisconsin roots — at Christiansted National Historic Site on Saint Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Much of the community on Saint Croix is poor and underserved. Recruiting local people to volunteer (i.e., work for free) is a hard sell. So, Meighan is thinking outside the box, with the enthusiastic blessing of his supervisor.

Yes, Meighan coordinates a small coterie of dedicated local volunteers. Beyond that, though, he is partnering with CVA interns at other parks to share resources and amplify their efforts. The capstone of that informal partnership was a “national climate action week” in September.

More than 15 parks hosted their own event, but “I kind of made it so that Saint Croix was at the heart of this matter. I'm trying to bring some attention nationally, because it's so hard to get things off the ground just here on the island,” Meighan says.

On St. Croix, four Caribbean region conservation partners took part in the climate action week, which included visits to the island’s two other NPS sites. At Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve participants planted mangrove. At Buck Island Reef National Monument they worked with nesting sea turtles and examined coral reef killed by warming waters and disease.

“It's time to let new people with new ideas try new things — and I have given Pearse almost no direction, on purpose,” says lead park ranger Eddy Kahle. “The community doesn't have faith in the Park Service, and Pearse is just this genuine, good-hearted soul. If anyone is going to repair the relationships, it’s someone like him.”

Jhulian Gutierrez, a CVA climate cohort intern based at Everglades National Park in Florida, is sharing resources with Pearse Meighan and other interns nationally.

NPS

The Other CVA Climate Cohort Sites

Beyond Saguaro and the Virgin Islands, climate cohort interns are serving at these NPS sites through December 2024: Acadia National Park, Maine; Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, Alaska; Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska; Everglades National Park, Florida; Lowell National Historical Park, Massachusetts; Pullman National Historical Park, Illinois; Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Massachusetts; Valley Forge National Historical Park, Pennsylvania; and War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam.

Ten new interns are scheduled to begin serving in February 2025.

The Community Volunteer Ambassador Climate Cohort is one of five youth and young adult programs supported by the Inflation Reduction Act that help fortify NPS sites in the face of a changing climate. The other four are the YMCA Partnership, Scientists in Parks, Landscape Stewardship Corps, and the Pacific Islands Conservation Corps.

Learn more about Community Volunteer Ambassadors.

About the Inflation Reduction Act

The Inflation Reduction Act provides the National Park Service with an historic opportunity to address critical ecosystem resilience, restoration, and environmental planning needs. Projects funded in national parks represent broad-scale and impactful resource investments across every corner of our nation—from Alaska to Florida to Maine. 

Have a question about Youth or Young Adult Programs?

Please e-mail us. Learn more about what we do. Be sure to follow us on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.