Q&A with Stacy Smith, Education Specialist at Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful
The way we connect with nature improves our communities more than you might imagine. Join us for a conversation about urban gardening, youth education, and how you can make a difference from your own backyard.
We’d love to hear more about your role at Keep Athens-Clarke County Beautiful. What are some of your main responsibilities?
I do a lot of our communications—editing the website, sending out newsletters, all that sort of stuff. I also manage our data and reporting. I connect volunteers with the Athens Area Tool Shed, where we lend tools for improvement projects at cemeteries, school gardens, our local university, and for community days of service. I also speak at schools and lead a lot of our education programs. Since our county has stormwater, water conservation, and recycling systems in place, we’re able to focus more than other affiliates might on beautification. I’m a Master Gardener and also got my Certificate in Native Plants through the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, and school gardens are a big part of our work. I’m also super interested in mapping litter and trying to find solutions for the problem, so we can prevent it instead of just picking it up all the time. I’m pretty passionate about that.
Do you have a favorite project (or two) that you’ve worked on in the past?
That would definitely be our school gardens. I really enjoy being able to get plants and set teachers up with workdays. We focus a lot on winter vegetables like greens, broccoli, and spinach. We also distribute radishes and that kind of thing. We prioritize plants that are indigenous to Georgia. We’ve installed pollinator gardens at a number of schools, and we plant trees and orchards. Some of my favorite moments are when students get to see creatures. I led a junior master gardener program, and as we were pulling up weeds, kids were seeing different insects and spiders. They get so excited when they see a worm. It’s the same when we do litter education or hand out reusable bags—I’m sure many students have seen them before, but they just go ooooh and get so excited. I even got asked if I was the mayor once!
I also love being able to connect people with things that they need through our Green Schools Program. We give credit to teachers and schools that do a certain amount of activities in a number of areas—litter cleanups, water conservation, recycling, air quality, wildlife—anything that has an environmental awareness component. We let them know about ways we can come and help out in their classrooms through tours, various programs we offer, or by introducing them to master gardeners or other environmental education partners. We have such a wide range of people willing to help with resources. My neighbor is an entomologist, for example, and she contacted us about grad students that wanted to do a pilot program with squash gardens and learning about food webs at different schools. I was able to connect them with a bunch of different teachers when they came to our Green Schools kickoff. They brought these cute shadow boxes with all the different insects that students had seen in their gardens. Or let’s say a teacher contacts me and really wants to know about solar energy. I can find a person for them.
Getting into the dirt at a garden work day
How has environmental education changed over the last year and a half? Do you plan to continue with any of the innovations you’ve made?
I’d say that a bulk of what I do is managing our gardens and getting volunteers into them, so we did not stop with that. We were able to keep up with them so there weren’t eight-foot-tall weeds when everyone returned. We hosted our Green Schools kickoff virtually, and in terms of incentives for our teachers, we recognized they had a hard year and did more with gifts than we usually would. Litter cleanups take place outside, so fortunately anybody still getting together with students during that time was still able to do that. Basically, we had less students and more upkeep, and a lot of administrative and other teaching staff changed, but we supported them however we could. I read stories online and found other virtual activities. They’re back now, and it’s nice that we never lost contact. I’m also a chair of the Advanced Training for Environmental Education in Georgia, and we had to develop virtual options for our cohort of educators since we couldn’t get together to do our in-person courses.
Why did you choose to get involved in this field? Why does Georgia’s environment matter to you?
I’ve always enjoyed being outdoors. When I first started going to school, I studied to become a wildlife biologist. I worked with the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey, and even in consulting doing environmental surveys, but I felt like in order to make a difference personally, I had to connect people with their environment. It matters even more in an urban area, where you can educate people on how to take care of the city and be aware of the nature around them. Not everyone spends time in national forests or has the time to go to state parks. Nature isn’t far off and apart from us; it’s right here in our city. It’s really important to plant native flowers in your own yard, be a part of the environment, and make an impact right where you are.
Any advice for people looking to make their communities cleaner, greener, or more beautiful?
In Athens, there are so many great ways to get involved. You really don’t have to start a huge project—you can volunteer with so many different organizations to plant gardens, clean things up, or get involved in education. For me, I just like to put native plants in my yard. I’ll sit outside and see hummingbirds, cardinals, caterpillars, and spiders, and I just feel like I’ve done something. Whatever else may not be going great at the time, I know that at least I’ve made a home for some critters.