Gen Z wants to work outside, but PNW conservation jobs are vanishing

After graduating from college with a degree in philosophy, Dylan Lorio-MacNamara felt lost. It was 2020, and he planned to apply to law school, but the pandemic changed everything.

A 10-month AmeriCorps program became a “lifeline” – and ultimately led to a career with the Northwest Youth Corps and other seasonal jobs.

Then in late April, President Donald Trump’s administration halted nearly $400 million in grants for AmeriCorps. In Washington state, roughly 1,300 AmeriCorps members lost their positions due to grant terminations, said Hayden Mackley, deputy communications director of Washington’s Office of Financial Management, in an email.

The cuts affected 800 job sites and $21 million in funding, according to Gov. Bob Ferguson’s office.

Lorio-MacNamara, 27, has the same pit in his stomach he felt during the early days of the pandemic.

“It’s really scary,” said Lorio-MacNamara, who now works with New Mexico’s conservation corps. “I have all these ideas and plans about grad school and career paths particularly in this conservation space that I live and work in, and a lot of it is under threat.”

Young people, eager to work outside, are facing the fallout of cuts to federal programs that have developed the next generation of workers for decades.

The Northwest Youth Corps hires people from ages 15 to 26 to maintain public lands: trail work, stream restoration and more. They work with federal agencies in Washington, Oregon and Idaho under AmeriCorps and the Youth Conservation Corps.

AmeriCorps was established in 1993 as the federal agency for national service and volunteerism. The corps also provides disaster relief.

The Northwest Youth Corps gives young people a chance to try a job in conservation, including those who were unable to land a competitive seasonal position with a national park, said Jeff Parker, the group’s president and CEO.

Federal cuts have limited the number of young people Parker’s organization can hire. Normally, the program has 135 college interns. This year, it was 100. The Northwest Youth Corps is hosting 750 teenagers, when it normally hosts 800 to 1,000. Parker said the program scaled back due to some “really distracting challenges with our federal partners.”

“With this administration, it’s been harder than ever before,” Parker said.

He said the organization’s agreements with federal partners “are not moving anywhere close to as efficiently as they used to.” They’re now taking a longer time to sign vital contracts for funding.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce federal spending. On Feb. 14, cost-saving DOGE cuts led to the firing of more than 1,000 probationary employees who were in the first or second year on a job with the National Park Service. An additional 700 took buyouts. It became known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. A month later, fired employees were reinstated by court order.

National park internship programs were also slashed. Some were in the middle of the season, and members were sent home with no warning.

A spokesperson from the National Park Service did not respond directly to questions about cuts, saying over email: “We have numerous programs that encourage youth and young adults to participate in managing and preserving their public lands through paid internships, volunteer projects, service corps positions, and other opportunities.”

‘A program that does such good’

David Vela served as the deputy and acting director of the National Park Service during Trump’s first term. He’s now critical of the cuts made by the administration.

Vela’s first exposure to working with the National Park Service came through the Youth Conservation Corps, established in 1971 to work on federal conservation efforts. His experience working in the parks as a young boy set a foundation for the rest of his life.

“When we lose the people who protect the parks, we risk losing the very parks themselves,” Vela said. “There’s an economic impact as well, when restrooms aren’t open and those trails aren’t maintained.”

Expertise and knowledge has already left the field, without time to pass on skills to the next generation, Vela said, and that institutional knowledge will take decades to replace.

“Those that were in the pipeline to take on those positions are now gone themselves,” he said. “Who is really interested at this point, with the uncertainty of what’s taking place?”

AmeriCorps has not publicly released details about which Youth Conservation Corps programs were cut. Some programs reported they “paused” due to lack of national funding.

Ta’Leah Van Sistine, 25, pivoted from a job in journalism about a year ago to join the Washington Conservation Corps, a branch of AmeriCorps open to adults 18 to 25, as well as military veterans of any age.

Van Sistine worked on restoration projects throughout Western Washington.

Usually more than 270 members serve with the Washington corps every January, said Curt Hart, spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Ecology, in an email. This year, 95 members made voluntary early exits, about 35 more than usual, Hart said.

These members left because of the decision to eliminate federal AmeriCorps grant funding, Hart said. About 14% of the state corps’ budget comes through AmeriCorps. The Washington corps had funding reinstated by a federal judge in July, and some members were reinstated. It’s unclear how many were reinstated or how many could receive back pay, according to the state Office of Financial Management.

Van Sistine loved working with other young people who are passionate about public lands. But once the Trump administration targeted AmeriCorps, she quit. Money was always tight while she was in the program and it became too difficult to stay, she said.

“I was very sad to leave,” said Van Sistine, who lives in Bothell. “It was really disheartening to see a program that does such good get cut.”

Another program cut was the National Park Service Academy, an internship that connects young adults from diverse backgrounds with summer jobs. This would have been the academy’s 15th year. It became a casualty of Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said Deidra Goodwin, a former National Park Service Academy coordinator.

“The program specifically is geared to pull in folks who don’t feel or see themselves represented in national parks – which is a lot of different identities,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin, who is Black and queer, was an alum of the program. The cohorts were always a “cool mixture” of backgrounds, Goodwin said. When the program ended, Goodwin wasn’t surprised, but was still upset.

“I definitely went through a quick moment of grief just knowing that’s 20 members that are losing out on that experience that made so much of a difference for me,” Goodwin said. “And for a lot of people that I know.”

‘You do it because you love it’

Since she was a teenager, Anna McCormick wanted to be a park ranger. Growing up on the East Coast, where public lands are far rarer than in the West, she didn’t know much about conservation work.

About four years ago she searched Google for “Pacific Northwest Conservation” and the first organization that popped up was the Northwest Youth Corps. McCormick has worked with the corps every summer since then and now works as the Oregon program coordinator in Eugene.

“If you work in conservation, you do it because you love it,” McCormick said. “This whole experience that we offer as an organization, it absolutely saved and changed my life.”

McCormick is staying optimistic: She sees herself working in this field for the rest of her life.

“Our lands, waterways, they really need it, and they need people who have the passion for it and the grit for it to continue to take care of it,” McCormick said.

Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps Network, said there’s already a lot of “mission-critical work not getting done.”

For example, Sprenkel said AmeriCorps would have deployed people to Central Texas to help with recovery from flooding that killed 135 people on July 4. But the entity that directs the corps’ disaster relief has been eliminated.

The Seattle Times interviewed 11 people in the conservation field for this story. All said young people still want to work in nature, without modern technology, where they can focus on the task at hand and collaborate with like-minded youth.

“We have the young people that want to do it,” said Parker, the Northwest Youth Corps CEO. “We just need to make sure that we’re not getting in their way to be able to exercise that.”

Parker said despite the cuts in funding, the Northwest Youth Corps is still accepting applications, even if it can’t accept as many people. And those young people are still working in conservation – even if that looks different from what they imagined.

Lorio-MacNamara said he grew professionally and made lasting connections at a transitional time in his life – whether he was putting out wildfires or just sitting around a campfire making s’mores with his colleagues after a hard day.

“It’s a lot of thankless work,” Lorio-MacNamara said. “It’s a lot of work that isn’t necessarily the most visible all the time, very easily forgotten and kind of looked over, but it is absolutely critical.”