Catherine Schenck

Partial Transcript: I am Catherine Schenck I’m the director of Education Outreach of Green River Preserve and also a 3rd generation Schenck who has been on this land. I grew up fishing these stream and hiking in these woods and now am back working full time here to help introduce these kids to the land and what it means to be connected to the natural environment around us.

Partial Transcript: It just means so much that I was raised and kind of seen that there were stories of me as a baby and we’re serving food to the kids and I was bouncing around distracting my mom.
It just means a ton to me to be involved and to continue the mission of both my dad and my grandfather who wanted to teach kids about the environment and how you connect with nature and how you can protect it.
I love the mission of this place and the joy on their faces when they catch that fish for the 1st time or if we have a really hard hike up a bald to see a view or to catch crawdads and play in the rivers. And get a chance Just to be outside which they never get… to come and be themselves here which is huge and really lacking in the world around us today…it provides a safe place to find that inner self which I think is really important and I love being able to help foster that connection.

Partial Transcript: So its really cool to see the kids and one of my favorite parts is when they get out of their cars and they feel that little bit of trepidation about what do I do without my cell phone or how do I interact with people
When I only know how to text? So now you get to see them being comfortable with themselves and getting outside and learning how to disconnect and put their phones down. So you see these kids , So the first meal of the session is always the quietest, so You get 7 new kids in a cabin and they are sitting there going *what did I get myself into? And its pretty quiet and they are learning things about each other and about themselves and by the end they’re really laughing loud and chatting up a storm to their counselors and each other. And just are forming life long friendships,, are formed here by getting muddy together and going to swim, exploring new things and learning that its cool to learn about the natural world.
So my favorite thing is getting those very shy kids at first beginning to find themselves in nature. You get Those same kids who were nervous getting out of their cars, when their mom and dad come to pick them up are crying because they don’t want to leave.

Partial Transcript: Sure man..oh sure oh stories man.
Couple of my favorites are kids who I’ve gotten to know throughout the years who keep coming back who we travel to go visit in their home towns.
We travel through the year
We call it the GRP road show, its really fun. One of our campers was a musician. She is currently here in this session and I knew her in her first 1 and 2 week sessions and she was very kind of quiet and a very curious bright child who love learning. And throughout the years you’ve seen the things she has picked up at Green rivers.
She is now really big into rock climbing that she learned here at camp and so has taken that passion that she learned here at Green River and is taking it out to the real world. So when we go to our roadshow in Charlotte she brings her ukulele and is playing for an entire restaurant full of people because she loves green river so much.
We recently had a parent-child weekend, she was able to bring her mom and they were going off the high dive and the zipline and all this fun stuff .so she was able to introduce her mom to the joys of being out at Green river and her mom was able to see firsthand all the things she had heard about.
Other stories oh wow,
I was a camp op coordinator here for awhile meaning I packed up all these kids and got them ready to go on a two night, three day backpacking trip that most of these kids have never done.
I sent out a group that I had been working with cause I was their mentor but
Because I was the Camp coordinator I wasn’t going with them but another person was. They were a little bit nervous about it and these were girls that I had once again known from one week and two week sessions.
We have this campsite called Chicken which is our furthest away
And they were going…I don’t really know about this Catherine, but they all left and I gave Them a big hug and I’m standing in the back field when they came back and I just saw the hughest smiles on their faces and upstretched arms of we persevered over this long hard hike. They had gotten caught in a big rainstorm and I am on the radio sitting back at base camp nervous for them knowing of their fear of that and of this long hike.
They had cheers of joy of We did this, we did it, and it was my favorite campout hike we’ve ever done.
So it was a really good experience of finding that fortitude and persevering and what it means to have a little bit of grit in this world, and sometimes the hardest things can also be the most fun.

Partial Transcript: I do this cause this place changed me. I was that shy and quiet kid that didn’t find my voice and had a lot of learning issues as a kid and I came here for my own solitude and being able to be myself. It helped me to learn in different ways and catered to my educational side.
I didn’t have to read it from a book, I had all these mentors that were telling me things.
I was learning stream ecology by being in the water and figuring out this was a crawdad and this was what a dichotomous key means.
And that hands on experiential education that I truly believe we are truly missing in our education system as it stands currently.
So I've been in a traditional classroom as a teacher and was able and fortunate to have a more hands on style .
And this place takes that to an extreme. So teaching kids that its okay to learn and to be passionate about the outdoors and its okay to be yourself.
I do this because I have seen so many people do this before me and give back to the land
After all it has given us and teaching those kids how to be themselves and how to find the joy of learning in a nontraditional classroom. and I think that is huge and I want to continue that method that both my dad and grandfather taught cause even though, you know, they didn’t know it at that time. It was experiential education at the time. They are now taking that message that they used for so long and now we are carrying on that tradition and I am very grateful to be a part of.

Partial Transcript: I think its important to connect to nature and all this world around us because its so easy to get caught in your own little bubble
You can just pull up a video on your phone and zone out and get lost for a couple of hours. How then do you connect with others around you? How do you develop those relationships with human beings who are so important to our lives in general.

I also think that connection is so important to the world around us. All of our everyday lives have an impact on rivers, streams, and mountains and people don’t realize that. Its easy to be walking down the street and think ok I can just throw this water bottle out no worries cause somebody will pick it up and they don’t realize that it might be going down to the river and out to the ocean because they don’t have a connection to it. So they don’t protect it they don’t keep it beautiful. So actually being outside and seeing the beauty of like when you are standing in the middle of a river and you have a fly rod in your hand and how pristine that can be. That they don’t see that. The litter and the trash and everything, so they don’t have that connection, they don’t have a real world experience of the natural world. they are not going to know the power .
How to protect it. Getting outside, getting muddy, getting dirty, hiking in the woods, going fly fishing in the rivers, even just going boating on a river gives you some value to that world. Its not just from instagram and double tap it ,”That’s awesome”. If you experience it firsthand you’re going to be much more likely to protect it.
And our world needs protecting right now, rivers need cleaning and that’s how you get that perspective for those connections.