January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Leslie Samuelrich may be one of the environmental world’s major new forces, but she is the first to say that she is more like “Joe and Josephine Average” than the stereotype of an environmentalist “tree hugger.”
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While in college, she had serious plans of becoming a stock broker. And she did not fall in love with camping and other outdoor activities popular among most environmentalists until she was in her 30s.
Ms. Samuelrich, 35, says that what compelled her to found Green Corps, a non-profit group in Boston that recruits and trains young people to become grassroots environmental organizers, was a conviction that the non-profit world was losing talented people. Too many college students, she says, don’t consider environmental work because they do not have the real-world experience required to win the field’s relatively few paying jobs.
“It would be a tragedy if we let these people get away,” says Ms. Samuelrich. “They want to do this work. They care about the environment. They just need the opportunity to get out there, gain hands-on experience, and show others what they’re capable of.”
Every spring, Ms. Samuelrich travels to college campuses to recruit seniors who have an interest in environmental work for Green Corps’ one-year training program. About 500 students applied last year for 20 fellowship spots. Green Corps fellows, who are given small stipends on which to live, receive a blend of classroom lectures from prominent environmental activists and hands-on experience organizing environmental protests and educational campaigns.
“Green Corps is one of the most important environmental groups today,” says Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, in Falls Church, Va., and the former homemaker who led the landmark protest in the 1970s against dumping toxic waste in the Love Canal, in upstate New York. “Organizing is the basis of all environmental issues, whether health or environment or whatever. It all comes back to: Can you get the public involved in the issue?”
Ms. Gibbs regularly speaks to the young environmentalists. Other speakers have included David Brower, a long-time environmental activist who founded the Earth Island Institute and the League of Conservation Voters, and Ross Gelbspan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on global warming, The Heat Is On. The speakers share practical tips on how to carry out a grassroots campaign, such as holding press conferences and motivating volunteers. Throughout the year, in between classroom time, the Green Corps trainees fan out across the country to get their feet wet leading environmental campaigns, from organizing rallies against clear-cutting in old-growth forests in the Northwest to picketing companies that are polluting rivers in New England.
Bob Bingaman, national field director of the Sierra Club and a member of Green Corps’ Board of Directors, says Ms. Samuelrich is effectively wedding two needs in the environmental field. “On the one hand,” he says, “there are hundreds of young people who want to do activist work, but have very few options if they can’t afford to do non-paying internships in D.C. On the other hand, there are a lot of environmental groups with a demand for people who have these grassroots organizing skills, but don’t have the resources to train aspiring activists.”
Ms. Samuelrich founded Green Corps in 1992 with Gina Collins Cummings, who has since left to work for Physicians for Human Rights. The two women met while working at different state chapters of the Public Interest Research Group, a national non-profit group that educates the public on current environmental and social issues.
Since 1992, Green Corps — which operates on an annual budget of $400,000, half of which is raised from national environmental groups that use the fellows’ help — has graduated 97 people from its program. In the past two years, all of the graduates have taken positions at environmental organizations (many as field directors) or at the helm of their own groups. Eighty-five per cent of all the people who have participated in Green Corps are still working for environmental groups.
Josh Marks, a graduate from the first class of Green Corps, says the training helped him win a major victory recently as field organizer for the Sierra Club in Georgia. Mr. Marks, 29, won a promise from DuPont, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, to scrap a plan to strip-mine titanium in the Okefenokee Swamp, in southern Georgia. The pledge came last month after a year in which Mr. Marks led educational campaigns and protests that got the word out about risks to the 700-square-mile swamp, which is home to thousands of species of plants and animals.
“It sounds like a cliche, but it’s definitely true to say that I wouldn’t be where I am today without Green Corps,” says Mr. Marks. “Leslie invests a ton of energy and resources in young people in the hopes of turning them into leaders for the next century. She is willing to take that risk, when most people are not.”
Ms. Samuelrich says she almost missed the opportunity to become an advocate for young environmentalists. “I was going to be a stock broker,” she says. During her junior year at Boston College, she worked as an intern at the investment company Dean Witter while she was also involved in a student-led campaign to encourage the Massachusetts legislature to pass a bill designed to encourage the recycling of aluminum cans.
“All of a sudden, while I was doing cold calling with Dean Witter, I realized that I’m really just calling a lot of wealthy people and getting them to make more money,” she says. “This isn’t really what I care about at all. So I have to stop leading this double life and really do what I want to do when I graduate.”
Before starting Green Corps, Ms. Samuelrich was the first national director of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, an education and social-service group that works on college campuses. She credits her five years there with instilling in her a belief that young people, once given “just a little encouragement and opportunity,” can blossom into leaders.
“Environmental leaders don’t pop out of nowhere,” she says. “They need to be identified, recruited, and trained. If we want to protect our public health and environment, we need to invest in this next generation.”
