Interview by Mercedes Arnold

Amara’s Awards

2020, 2021 Grantee National Geographic Young Explorer

2022 Brower Youth Award Winner

2022 Grist 50 ‘Meet the Fixers’ 

Maine Vibes Magazine: Can you state your name and pronouns, and talk about what you do? 

Amara Ifeji: My name is Amara Ifeji, I use she/her pronouns. I am currently a junior at Northeastern University in Boston, where I study political science and environmental studies and am set to graduate in the spring of 2024. I am incredibly grateful for the major that I have because it lends really well to the work that I do with the Maine Environmental Education Association (MEEA). I serve as the Director of Policy at MEEA and work to introduce environmental education into the room. We're sitting in this space of yes, we are education, and yes, we are environmental work. However, we're often left out of both conversations. So my role is primarily to make sure that environmental education is centered in both of these conversations and that policy is advancing education, advancing the natural world, and also have themes of community engagement and education as well.

MVM: Thank you for you taking the time to talk with Maine Vibes, Amara! I think what you are doing is incredibly important and needed and I’m honored to be able to talk with you about your work. I heard your story about you learning to ride your bike and your determination to make it happen and be outdoors. Where did your passion for the environment and outdoors come from? 

AI: It definitely started much earlier than that [riding my bike]. My family and I emigrated from Nigeria to the United States in 2004, when I was three, and moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, which is five miles outside of DC. We moved to an urban area where I did not have very many opportunities to explore the natural world. 

I grew up in a very hustling bustling household, at one point we had 14 people living in our three-bedroom space. I loved having my cousins, aunts, and uncles so close, but I also liked peace and quiet. I would go out to this tree that we had in the back of our pretty small yard and sit under there and listen to the cicadas. I really felt very serene in that setting. I think those were the pretty formative experiences that I had in the natural world. I didn’t have very many opportunities, they didn’t come until much later in life. But I think it really started there with curiosity and the peace that I was able to gain from being in that setting.

MVM: When did your family end up moving to Maine? 

AI: I moved to Maine in 2011. It's interesting because I have lived in Maine for more of my life than not. It’s only been until very recently that I've really considered myself to be a Mainer, which is cool. We moved to Maine so my mother could pursue her educational dreams and she decided to stay. Thankfully, my parents stayed, they recognized the host of opportunities that my sister and I had in this state and they made a commitment to make sure that we kept having opportunities by staying here. 

MVM: Did you find that moving to Maine provided additional opportunities for outdoor activities? 

AI: Being in outdoor spaces in Maine, they were close due to how beautiful the state is and the host of opportunities there are, having state parks close by, etc., but at the same time they were even further away. It’s also recognizing that when I was going up, both of my parents were in school. They were really making an effort to give my sister and me the lives they had envisioned for us. Due to the capacity constraints they had, we didn’t get to the parks. I wasn’t going to go to the park by myself, that wasn’t something I was going to do, so I didn’t really have those opportunities. The park was a couple of miles from my house, but I don’t think I ever had the opportunity to go there.

Then there’s summer camp culture which is really big in Maine. I remember my sister was able to do summer camp for three weeks and got a scholarship to go. They cut our cable because my mom was not able to afford it, but she really wanted my sister to have the experience. I also wanted to have the experience, but that was not something I was able to do, especially being the oldest. I think they [my parents] tried as much as they were able to. There is this narrative of exclusion in Maine. People don’t think, for example, that state parks are a barrier, but if you actually want to go, we live in a transportation desert. How do you get to state parks if you don’t have a car? The bus doesn’t go from Portland to Bradbury Mountain State Park. How is one supposed to actually get themselves to state parks? If you do get to a state park, people will say, oh yeah, they are only $4.00! but $4.00 is not an only to somebody, and the price keeps going up. It is incredibly expensive to go to a state park for a lot of people like Acadia. 

MVM: And Acadia is far! 

AI: And it’s far! I live in Bangor and it’s far! There is definitely this culture of outdoors in Maine that I was able to experience. I did get to go to Acadia National Park through a summer camp that my friend’s parents hosted. I was really grateful that I had that opportunity, I was there on a scholarship. There were very few opportunities that I had. The first one that I did have was riding a bike, it was my neighbor’s bike and she had let me use it. We lived in a small apartment complex and I kept circling back on the bike and kept circling until I was finally able to ride the bike. I spent hours riding that bike because there wasn’t much else to do. It wasn’t until high school that I felt like, I’m really frustrated and tired, honestly of not having ways to explore this passion that I’ve grown in. I began to self-seek those opportunities and serve as a conduit for students like myself to have those opportunities as well. 

MVM: It sounds like your pursuit to include environmental education and outdoor activities are coupled with racial justice and including marginalized groups in those activities. You facilitated environmental learning opportunities at your high school, was this your initial experience in becoming the leader that you are today? 

AI: I would definitely say so. In my freshman year of high school, I joined my school's STEM program, and that was the first opportunity I had to explore my passion through a research lens. I knew I wanted to do an environmental project and my teacher was telling us about these really cool worms that eat plastic. I was ready to get some worms and have them eat plastic, and I thought I’ll be able to have them eat the plastic from all the landfills! I was a very ambitious person. I completed the project and used different types of plastic and the worms actually ate some of the plastic, which was really cool. That was the first experience that made me think, Wow, I’m doing something that can positively contribute to protecting and preserving the natural world. 

The research director of my high school was writing a grant and secured funding to host a program at the University of Maine with the stormwater management and research team. I had initially gone to that program, and I think that’s where my passion for community science began. I had a week where I was living at UMaine, I was going out water testing every day, and I was building sensors. I thought that was so cool, that I had the opportunity to be a community scientist. And, yes, explore my passion for the environment, but also integrate it with the STEM disciplines that I had become very passionate about. 

The next year, the program was a teacher program, so it didn't really have that student element, but I was still involved in serving as a student facilitator. I would say that I was really missing that aspect of having other students there with me. Then the year after that funding ran out, so the program was not going to happen. I saw that as a really big disservice to students like me, who never had an opportunity to explore the natural world. 

I brought it to my research teacher and one of my mentors and said This is something that I want to do. I was also coming off of attending the Maine Environmental Changemakers gathering, which is a program of the organization where I now work for. So I attended that and felt so empowered and thought, I can actually do stuff if I want to if I put my mind to it. I recognized that it was the thing I wanted to do, I knew how impactful it was for me. So, over the course of a few months, I decided that I was going to host a community science training institute, similar to the one that I had, which was a bigger effort than I had anticipated. I wrote a grant through one of my mentor’s nonprofits. She's amazing. She has a nonprofit where she does water testing in Honduras and Guatemala. I wrote a grant, and we got $5,000! Then I reached out to some community partners to see if we could tour a wastewater treatment facility so people can know, this is what happens to your water, this is how we keep it safe and protect it. I reached out to students of color and alternative education students. A lot of them had expressed how deterred they were from pursuing STEM or environmental science as a whole, because of the education they had already received. These narratives were completely changed at the end of this week-long training institute. Students were telling me how they were going to sign up for chemistry or biology and they wanted to do research and continue the program. 

We had 20 student participants, and all of them continued in the program, and we had made a club for the program. I think that really speaks to how passionate the students were about being able to do something to protect their environment, even if it’s sampling our local body of water, the Penobscot River watershed. All of the students performed research and presented at the science fair, and won awards for their research. I saw how powerful environmental education was, in not only giving students the opportunity to explore their passions in a way they had never been able to but really empowering students period. Then that I realized I wanted more opportunities to do that, to serve as an environmental educator to advance systems change work. At the end of this time, a fellowship position with MEEA opened. I applied for it, and I got the role. That’s where my formal career in environmental education started.

MVM: That’s amazing! Is the program still continuing at your high school?

AI:  It is, yeah, to the best of my knowledge.

MVM: That’s pretty awesome! You created opportunities for other students to feel empowered around environmental change. Why do you think opportunities like that are important? 

AI: There are different lenses I can use to answer that question. 

As it relates to social and emotional learning; being outdoors and being in the environment, students just feel better. It is a lot to be in a classroom for six hours every day, and then go home and be in your room doing your homework for four hours, that is a lot. To have something that breaks up the day and gets you out where you’re able to move and take in the sun, see trees, and breathe fresh air, that itself is inherently a good thing. 

This isn’t my favorite lens, but I do need to touch on it. Looking at it from an economic standpoint; a lot of youth leave Maine and don't come back. We have the oldest population in the U.S. Our workforce and economy are not where they need to be as a result of that. If students have something that's keeping them tethered to the state of Maine, where they know that they're passionate about the environment, they have really formative experiences in the natural world, it will make them more likely to say there's some amazing work going on in the state of Maine around green jobs, and there's heat pump installation, there's solar panel installation, there's the whole climate Council in the governor's office, there is a lot of work that's happening. If they feel they are passionate about all of these different things, they're more likely to stay in our state and thus positively contribute to our economy and our workforce, and the state is better because of it. An investment in environmental education is an investment in Maine's economy and means overall well-being as a state. There's a lot going on and I don't think a lot of youth recognize that, but if they were given an opportunity to explore that, I would say a lot of them would be more passionate about it. 

Looking at it in terms of an equity and justice standpoint; youth of color typically do not get these opportunities. My story is a single story and there are a lot of narratives in which people are not able to explore the environment and the natural world, which is a big disservice to students of color. Traditionally, their communities are the ones that are most harmed in the natural world. There are lynchings that are still happening. People are scared. My parents weren’t trying to take opportunities away from me, they were trying to have me keep my life. They were scared of being outside because of stories they had heard and things that they personally experienced. I recognize the harm that has been caused. I don’t like that single story of this being a bad place, because it’s not just a bad place. There need to be opportunities for youth in a protected setting so they are able to explore how being outside isn’t only harmful, but there is a joy that comes from it. You can really have so so much fun. Again, it’s a big disservice to youth of color, in particular, to shield them from that and continue to feed into the single story that the outdoors is just a place of harm. 

MVM: Are there any particular programs in Maine that would be good for people to get involved in? Or ways that people can contribute and these programs? 

AI: I'll speak to the policy space, as that's the one that I'm actively working in. There are a bunch of different federal bills that are being introduced or have been already been introduced relating to environmental education. One of them is the Living Schoolyards Act, which would create a grant program at the Department of Education, where schools could directly apply for funding to support the creation of living school grounds, so everything wouldn’t be pavement. It would provide funding for a water recycling program or a gardening program, things like this that help makes schoolyards more engaging. The bill also would reserve 5% of funds for exclusive use by tribal schools and communities. 

Another one is the No Child Left Inside Act, which has been a 12-13 year effort at this point. Senator Collins recently signed on as an original co-sponsor, so that’s promising. One of the components of that bill is an outdoor school model that’s coming out of the state of Washington, where schools can apply for funding for fifth or sixth graders to have a one-week immersive residential learning program in the outdoors, which is amazing. 

There are also generally groups that are doing this work, a lot of different ad hoc groups. Actually, one of the projects that I'm working on right now is a landscape analysis for the environmental education efforts that are happening, led for, and led by communities of color. 

There is a partnership with The Third Place in Portland that is centered on creating spaces for BIPOC professionals and the Nature Based Education Consortium, which advances equitable access to the outdoors for all youth. There's this Eco-BIPOC consortium network that they're actively building for folks to have a space to share about being professionals in the environmental space as people of color, which is great, I love that, there's not a lot of that. The Nature Based Education Consortium is also giving out Maine state park passes to people of color so they can get outside.

My organization, MEEA, has mini-grants for outdoor learning. One of our criteria is a free reduced lunch rate. So we have been prioritizing higher-needs schools and school districts, educators can apply for funds for a wide array of things, whether it's building an outdoor classroom, snow pants, and snow boots and gear for their students so they can get outside even during the winter. There are so many things and ideas that we have. At this point, we funded about 1/4 of all the public schools in Maine. It's been really awesome to get photos of youth playing outside. It's incredible. 

These are just a few of the programs in Maine! 

MVM: Amazing, thank you! Does MEEA have any programs that youth can get involved with? Or do we support MEEA? 

AI: People can check out the Maine Environmental Education Association website. Our signature event is our annual gathering, which happened in September.  For youth that are thinking more about activism in the environmental space, Maine Youth for Climate Justice is a huge coalition of around 20 or so organizations. There's also individual membership, there's a bunch of training and resources for youth who are excited and interested in advocacy around environmental issues. 

I’d also say, yes it’s very important to be connected to statewide opportunities, but I think where it’s most important, and an area where I found my passion, is through my school and the local community. So, if there’s not already an eco team or environmental club or maybe a school garden association, I’d really encourage youth to start their own initiatives at their schools. It’s very unlikely that you are the only one thinking that’s a need at your school. You can find a really awesome community at your school that you’re able to connect with every day or once a week, however often you choose. It’s deciding to take yourself up on the passion that you have and there isn’t already an opportunity to explore that passion. I’d encourage you to find a teacher and see what you can build in terms of a club or team.

MVM: This has been so great, thank you for your time! I am so thankful for you and the work you’re doing. 

Thank you to Amara Ifeji for taking the time to talk with Maine Vibes Magazine!

Web: Maine Environmental Education Association

Web: 2022 Brower Youth Award Winner

Instagram: @meeassociation

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