Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

I am Akari Nakashima. I live in southern California and president of the eco-friendly community club calle, Alive, which I created a year ago. I am also a member of multiple clean up community services. I am freshly new to activating but, I would love, especially for my fellow students to go through my 1 year eco-activists journey with me.

The spark started when I was in 4th grade. For my school project we visited the sewage treatment plant. There I first learned the reality our planet was fighting towards. Plastic floating through the wind into the ocean destroying life within the ocean. But after that, I simply forgot. Like every other majority kid losing attention. Like nothing happened. It was until the end of High School that my tiny spark turned into a fire.

During covid, end of Junior year, I saw a boy and a parent cleaning the streets on tv. With not much thought I thought ,This is it. With my passion towards action, my family and I started neighborhood trash pick ups. Starting off from the park near our house, with an unbelievable amount of trash, completely forgetting time, it took 5 hours without a single thing left behind, with three bags of huge trash bags in our hands. And our back soar.

Realizing that we are in need of more hands to help, During summer break I created an eco-friendly community club with my friends called ,Alive, and started our weekly Saturday clean ups. Our motto was to clean the world from the inside such as parks and streets and not the beach. Our club values in educating students and even adults. While many people continue to clean up local beaches, our club moved our perspective to more inland parks and streets. It is important to understand trash like cigarettes from parks and roads significantly affect marine life. By getting washed away from rain through the drain to the ocean. Especially because rain ducts in my town do not filter out materials, trash is spit into the ocean. Cigarettes heavily contaminate marine life along with countless plastic items. Our community club is dedicated to expanding this idea of cleaning from the inside through collaborations with school clubs to increase opportunities for students to connect. Currently our club is holding connections with 4 in school volunteer clubs. We work on educating students during park clean ups every Saturday where markets are held. Our club concentrates on spreading the importance of cleaning along with thoughts of recycling. With my idea our club started a project to create a hand made recycling bin in my high school because there were none before us. To encourage recycling, bin I designed has a mouth in the center where the trash is thrown so the whole bin is designed as a funny gobble monster. This has my hopes to connect recycling and fun together.
Creating a community club was my first biggest challenge. As a follower I have always been behind the shadows but being the first time creating my own club I was able to take a step forward to action towards a topic I was interested in.

Another goal our club has is to create a club that is full of warmth and connection where not only students but also adults can come anytime during their spare time. We do not have any memberships because we figured it would be best if people can come casually during their spare time to help clean our community.

This year I have moved on to college 8 hours away from home and I believed it was time to pass this club on to a younger generation hoping that ,Alive can be a club that is grounded to our town and keeps getting bigger as an eco friendly community group. We even has activities planned in the future to collaborate with the school to do field trips at sewage treatment plant activity museums for elementary schools hoping it can create a spark again in someones heart.

My recycling life started beginning before my college application but I am certain that it let me into the school I am currently in, UC Davis majoring in Design and Sustainable Environment. At UC Davis I am devastated to absorb much information from many different fields to expand my scope of activity. The reason I applied to the Apprentice Ecologist project on behalf of the Nicodemus Wilderness Project not only because I am taking two majors but also because I am planning to add on a Managerial economics minor. In order to finish my studies in 4 years it will be helpful for me and my family, and for my younger sister to receive as much financial aid as possible. I cannot wait to finish my studies and move on to my dreams of moving on and supporting forest lands and the scientific mechanism of life cycle and balancing the effects of what humanity continues to cause upon nature.

Even in such a short time span the club changed me as a human being and as a future researcher. By the end of my senior year, our club succeeded in having over 15 times more volunteers than from when we started. Creating connections, creativity, and recently, succeeded in setting water refill stations in my old high school reaching the money threshold earning from recycling trashes we picked up.
My motto is, it is never too late to do anything. My time as an active volunteer has just been a year but, the time I spent during the year has been full of new, excitement, and joy to be able to move forward.

Finally, hoping my essay will be seen by others. I would love to leave it out there to the majorities who are just like what I was. Sitting on a couch lying, hoping something exciting will happen to your life. It only gets harder when you're waiting. Sitting. Take a step and open your mind. Maybe you will find the world fascinating like I did. Taking a step is not hard, you simply lean your body forward, let your mind free and do what you think is right because there is no limit to how far you can go.