Debbie Crockett shows how salmon "dress for success."

"I NEED FIVE VOLUNTEERS, PLEASE," I announce, and eager hands thrust toward the classroom ceiling. I choose five of the third-graders and arrange them in a semicircle facing the class. "Okay, we need the tallest in the middle, the shortest on the ends. Good! Now, the tops of your heads are mountain peaks, and all of you together are a watershed." I turn to the rest of the class: "Now imagine you are a drop of rain falling from the sky. You land on the mountaintop and flow down the face of the mountain into...Help me out here!"
"Streams?" one student ventures.
"Good! Then the drop flows into ..."
"Rivers," several voices chime.
"Exactly! Then the rivers may flow into the bay, and finally into ..."
"The OCEAN!" The class understands now.
I smile triumphantly, "Thats right! This is a watershed."
Only two years ago, when I was tucked away in a lab in Nebraska working on my senior research project (searching for a genetic basis for dyslexia), I would not have imagined myself teaching children about watersheds. Nor would I have envisioned myself examining northern California streams for habitat value to salmon or organizing public meetings to encourage better natural resource management. Yet during the past two years I have been immersed in such work for the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project.
As a biology student at Creighton University in Omaha, I had initially aspired toward medical school. By the time I was a senior, though, I knew that I first wanted to work in the field of biology, preferably in ecology. Work opportunities were abundant in business and computers, but jobs related to the natural sciences proved harder to come by. When I heard about AmeriCorps through my university's career center, I decided to look into it. I knew that there was much good work to be done by a domestic Peace Corps, and I had time and energy to contribute.
AmeriCorps is part of President Clinton's 1993 National Service Initiative. Its motto is "Getting things done," and its goal is to help communities meet education, public safety, human, and environmental needs. More than 26,000 volunteer members now serve in hundreds of AmeriCorps programs nationwide, 2,300 of them in California. They earn a living stipend of $5.75 an hour ($900 a month for full-time service, with health insurance), and also receive an educational award of $4,725 a year, which can be used to attend any accredited academic or vocational institution or to repay any guaranteed student loan. AmeriCorps members range in age from 17 up (there is no upper age limit) and serve for up to two years. Each AmeriCorps project is developed to meet a particular set of needs within a community. The Watershed Stewards Project is helping agencies collect information, coordinate cooperative planning efforts, and find the funding to improve natural resource management in northern California.
I was one of 49 AmeriCorps members (and three paid staff) working in nine agencies under the guidance of resource professionals, known as mentors. Most of us entered the program with college degrees. Our task was, broadly, to assess, monitor, and enhance watersheds between Santa Cruz County and the Oregon border. Cooperation with local landowners, businesses, and industries is essential to our success.
We conducted stream habitat surveys, biological and aquatic sampling, road system inventories, and watershed information exchange. We built and evaluated structures in streams to provide better habitat and migration pathways for salmon. Of a member's 1,700 hours of annual service, 100 are spent in direct community outreach. We taught schoolchildren about salmonid life cycles, sound land use practices, and watershed processes; participated in community restoration projects; and coordinated community conferences.
An AmeriCorps member encounters a wide range of challenges and has a chance to shoulder real responsibility. Last year Joe Mateer and I, serving with the Coastal Conservancy, helped organize the Humboldt Bay Symposium, a two-day community forum designed to encourage residents of the Humboldt Bay watershed to envision the region's future and begin planning for shared goals. We and other AmeriCorps members staffed the event, took notes, got the local schools involved, and helped write the proceedings.
Our project moved forward. During the summer we worked in pairs surveying 1,200 miles of streams. In the winter months we entered the data we had gathered into computers. When analyzed, these data provided information about stream and watershed conditions and helped us develop watershed plans and restoration projects.
Each of us remembers special moments when we were struck by the value of AmeriCorps service. Toni Ouradnik, serving with the Institute for Fisheries Resources in San Francisco, recalls a phone conversation with Mark Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, who had called with a question she was able to answer. "It suddenly hit me how much I have learned," she said, "and what an honor it is to work with a person whose work I deeply respect."
For some of us, AmeriCorps has opened doors we did not know existed. "When I was growing up in East Los Angeles, it never dawned on me that I could have a job in the woods," says Yesenia Renteria, serving with the U. S. Forest Service in Eureka. She planned to be a social worker until, traveling by train through Europe a few summers ago, she suddenly realized she would rather have a job outdoors. She remembers the moment: " It was in Switzerland. The train went through a seven-mile tunnel. When we came out we were on the other side of the mountains."
Renteria transferred to Humboldt State University and graduated with a degree in forestry. Last summer she spent a week in Saratoga leading groups of urban fifth-graders on forest hikes. "They are disconnected from nature," she said. "I would start talking to them and they would get excited that I grew up in L.A. and could speak Spanish with them. Then they really listened to me. We need to give these kids role models--to show them I'm just like you, you could do this too! "
For others, the Watershed Stewards Project has been the key to doors they had earlier tried but could not open. Tony Llanos, 25, who graduated from Humboldt State University last year with a degree in environmental engineering, found himself trapped in a frustrating loop when he went in search of employment: he needed experience to get a job, and a job to get experience. AmeriCorps gave him a way to break out of that loop. He is now at the Six Rivers National Forest Watershed Analysis Center, working with hydrologist Carolyn Cook to develop a methodology to estimate the volume of sediment in tributaries of the South Fork of the Trinity River. During his second year of AmeriCorps, he will work to develop a long-term monitoring plan for the river.
"The Watershed Stewards Project is an opportunity to see what people in the field are doing and thinking--something which is difficult to achieve without an 'in' such as this," Llanos says. It also sometimes provides an inside track to career opportunities. "Members get a chance to network with professionals, find out where jobs are open, and to prove themselves," says project director Michelle Rose.
Of the 112 people who have participated in this project so far, 43 have moved on to entry-level professional positions in natural resources, Rose said. Of the rest, 18 are completing undergraduate work, 12 have entered graduate programs in the natural sciences, seven are in programs preparing them for teaching, two have joined the Peace Corps, and 13 are doing a second year with AmeriCorps.
For the communities in which participants serve, the benefits far exceed any costs. "I don't think some of the work members do would ever get done without them," says Michelle Rose. "In Mendocino County, where up to 95 percent of the land is privately owned, resource professionals are so taxed they seldom have the time it takes to work with individual landowners toward changes in land use practices. With AmeriCorps we can do that. We have the people."
Of the services we perform, our work in the schools is perhaps most widely known and appreciated. We draw not only from our service experience, but also from recent academic studies to come up with classroom presentations and activities that are instructive and meaningful. Project participants tend to be very enthusiastic about this aspect of the program.
As for me, I am now looking into a graduate program in ecosystem management. I had been attracted to a holistic approach to medicine and now realize that this approach can be applied to natural resource management as well. All things in nature are interconnected. This I knew before, in the abstract, and now I have experienced it. I have a far better idea now of where I want to go and can see pathways that can take me there. I believe that AmeriCorps programs are a good investment in our country and hope that others will continue to have this opportunity to serve well into the future.

AmeriCorps programs nationwide are funded in large part through the National Community Services Trust Act of 1993, which is presently up for reauthorization. The Corporation for National Service funds the educational award, up to 85 percent of stipend and health insurance costs, and up to 67 percent of other project costs. The rest of the funding comes from participating state and federal agencies and nonprofit groups in the communities where the AmeriCorps members serve. The California Commission on Improving Life through Service reviews each AmeriCorps project annually to determine whether to refund it. The Watershed Stewards Project is one of the few in California already to have been approved through the year 2000.