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We are excited to share that our 2024 season of the Borderlands Earth Care Youth (BECY) internship is underway. This year's interns comprise a binational crew of seven talented and driven students representing both the high school and university levels and the regions of Patagonia, Nogales, Rio Rico, and Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. This year's scope of our work has also expanded to new sites, with projects hosted by partners in Tumacácori and Tucson. Through their involvement in BECY, these interns will develop their environmental literacy and ties to the community, all while completing ecological restoration projects with long-term benefits to the resilience of our watersheds, flora and fauna, and human life within the Sky Islands region.
BECY is a seven-week paid internship for youth and young adults ages 15-24 with a passion or curiosity for solving today's sustainability challenges. In addition to our work projects, the program follows a curriculum adapted to the work so that learning is primarily hands-on and engages the unique expertise of our project partners. Interns learn restoration principles on the watershed, ecosystem, and community level and connect with sustainability on a global level through topics such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. This internship is part of BRN's vision to create accessible work opportunities in conservation and a sense of stewardship for a sustainable future, especially in rural border communities.
Our education facilitators this year are Jordan Sene and Nick Botz. Jordan Sene received her Masters in Sustainability Solutions from Arizona State University and serves as BRN's Education Program Manager, coordinating BECY from behind the scenes and stepping up to the plate to lead the interns once the season begins. Nick Botz is in his Bachelor's in Music Education from ASU with a minor in Sustainability and returns for his third year as a BECY facilitator. Jordan and Nick are both BECY alums from high school, having experienced firsthand this program's ability to change lives.
The BECY crew has completed two of the seven weeks of BECY programming, starting our first week with an introduction to erosion control techniques. Interns got to pair up with members of the BRN Watershed Restoration crew at active work sites in the Borderlands Wildlife Preserve and T-4 Ranch, learning every step of the watershed restoration process alongside professionals in the field. We also visited Borderlands Earth Care Center (BECC, formerly Deep Dirt Farm Permaculture Institute) to create concept sketches for our upcoming mural project based on our observations of permaculture in action.
In April, interns brought these sketches to life in four murals. Painted on the surface of the shipping crate offices of BECC's Visitor's Center, these murals depict the natural and human history of the borderlands, key processes such as migration, pollination, and the water cycle, and the most beloved elements of our physical landscape that gives Patagonia its sense of place. We were joined by Cassina Farley and Ash Jacobs from the Patagonia Community Arts Center for guidance on the mural process. The interns, most of whom were in their first-ever encounter with large-scale painting, showed fantastic creativity and added permanent beauty to the visitor's center through their unique perspectives.
April also brought our arts ecology series in collaboration with Patagonia Community Arts Center. Interns learned woodworking with Zach Farley, our Watershed Restoration crew lead, to create sculptures and cutlery from native plant materials. Local craft artist Susan Corl led a two-day workshop in bookmaking, where interns created field journals from hand-made recycled paper. Through their work alongside Patagonia's resident artists, the interns learned how a community could be engaged in activism through art and interactivity.
BECY will run for another five weeks in May-June and begin with a trip to the Canelo Project in Sonoita for a demonstration of permaculture techniques. The interns will then participate in redesigning BECC for future programming in permaculture education alongside a visiting crew of graduate students from the University of Arizona's Field Studies in Creative Writing. Later in the program, we will collaborate with the organization Friends of Sonoita Creek for water testing and mapping work in Patagonia Lake and Sonoita and Harshaw Creeks, Borderlands Nursery and Seed in propagating native plants for habitat restoration, South32 and Patagonia Area Resource Alliance on critical discussions of environmental literacy and land stewardship, Tumacácori National Historical Park for GPS mapping and soil restoration, and The Nature Conservancy for invasive species removal on the Sonoita Creek Preserve.
At the end of the BECY program, our interns will present the final reflection projects they have been working on, demonstrating what they learned in the field through a creative medium or project in the community. All are invited to save the date for our 2024 BECY graduation on June 27, where the interns will deliver these presentations in the Tin Shed Theater in Patagonia!