Hawaii Nature Center

The high school that I went to, Assets School had a program called Mentorship where each year all students spent each Wednesday at an unpaid internship instead of going to regularly scheduled class. For Freshmen this was on campus, organized by a teacher, but from Sophomore year on, students were encouraged to find an off-campus workplace they could work at for the year. For my junior year I picked the Hawaiʻi Nature Center. I picked them because I spent a lot of my summers and winters before I was twelve in their nature camps, which I remember fondly.

In the internship, I helped the teachers of the nature center guide grade school classes on field trips through educational programs. I also helped with the set up and clean up needed for these demonstrations. At the end of the school year, I decided that I wanted to spend that summer volunteering at the Nature Center in the summer camp program that I loved so much as a kid.

I ended up doing around 200 hours of volunteer work that summer and another hundred the next. Again there was help teaching lessons on nature, as well as set up and clean up, but the summer program also involved tasks like watching out for the safety of the children as they fished with nets in the Makiki valley stream, as we did all day hikes and stream rambles in the valley, and on field trips to the beach.