Louisville ECHO is largely grant-funded to increase equitable opportunities for children, predominantly youth of color and youth from low-income backgrounds, to experience the outdoors. It consists of multiple complementary components intended to create “cradle to career” (i.e., continual) opportunities for youth to experience nature. Current components include school-based field trips for elementary-age students, out-of-school time programming, and resume-building summer job opportunities for young adults. Through these complementary components, Louisville ECHO aims, in part, to address under-representation of minorities in environmental–related fields. A robust career-readiness component is critically-important and we seek to build upon the 2017 pilot. Louisville ECHO is the programmatic component of Louisville Parks and Recreation’s West Louisville Outdoor Recreation Initiative (WLORI) which seeks to create nearby-nature opportunities for west Louisville youth to experience nature. WLORI includes an infrastructure component to create enhanced amenities to facilitate growth of Louisville ECHO programming in west Louisville. This includes the creation of an outdoor learning center in Shawnee Park (currently in design phase) and improved recreational amenities such as canoeing and fishing access, and soft-surface trails. In 2018, across all of our program areas we served nearly 5,000 youth. Of these, 2,500 attended Louisville ECHO program activities, including field trips offered to 4th graders at six public elementary schools (four of which are in west Louisville); Louisville ECHO’s week long summer adventure camp for teens from target neighborhoods; fall, winter, and spring recreation-based OST programming (e.g., archery, hiking, climbing); and the summer job training program.

*Bachelor of Arts in communications, public administration, recreation or education programming, environmental studies or related field preferred*

VISTA will undertake critical capacity building tasks as we seek to sustain and grow the Louisville ECHO initiative for community impact (e.g., addressing related social determinants of health equity). Expected tasks include, but are not limited to: Facilitating development of an empowered community council to help guide the initiative Recruiting ECHO community council members and volunteers; Developing procedures for tracking “dosage” of time spent in nature by participants; Collecting and reporting participant data; Marketing ECHO program activities to the community; Educating community groups about the ECHO initiative; Assisting with fundraising activities including grant writing; Developing an “ECHO kids” family membership program; Developing and administering survey instruments.