Latest News

CULTURE AND HISTORY

Mask Making Adventures Program

Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) City of Los Angeles

Mask Making Adventures Program guides youth into artistic explorations into the cultural history and natural resources in Northeast Los Angeles through this mask making process, in the process youth connect with their diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds.

Children and youth are guided into artistic explorations of the cultural and natural history in Northeast Los Angeles through the mask making process. Throughout the program youth keep a Language Arts journal that includes library research that provide participants with opportunities to connect with their diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds and the Native American history of these lands surrounding the Boys and Girls Club. This partially funded by the Department of Cultural Affairs City of Los Angeles.

Neighborhood Artist in Residence Judy Leventhal, LCSW in partnership with our Fine Arts Director Dwayne Campbell orchestrated the Mask Making Adventures Program.

SUSTAINABILITY

Water Conservation and Energy Efficiency

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Teen members in leadership at our club are working together to help take care of our trees.

During this Tree Care workshop our members learned the importance of fertilization and mulch. Fertilization is an important part of tree care as it helps the trees increase their resistance to injury from any diseases and insects. Moreover, adding mulch to our trees is not only an essential part of tree care, but it is also an important step towards water conservation. Adding mulch to our trees will help reduce the amount of soil moisture loss through evaporation, allowing our trees to receive the hydration they need without us having to use more water! A great step towards water conservation is by fertilizing and adding mulch to our trees! Thank you to Tree People!

Our Tree Care workshops allowed our members to come up with ideas together to help conserve water. When they learned about the importance of mulch, they had an idea to manually water the trees instead of using irrigation systems such as sprinklers or a hose!

By manually watering the trees, our members were able to keep track of the amount of water they are using and also help conserve as much water as they possibly could. This helped them see how much water is actually needed to maintain plants and trees in comparison to how much water they usually waste using a sprinkler system or a hose.

In this indoor workshop, younger members learned about the water cycle with bracelets! After watching a short video that introduced each step of the water cycle, our members were able to identify major steps of the water cycle in chronological order. To help visualize these steps we brought labels of each with a corresponding color. We then brought in string and beads of the same colors. The goal was to create a bracelet with the pattern that matched the chronological order of the water cycle.

How we obtain the water we consume is also a major factor in energy efficiency and water conservation.

Our pre-teens and younger members worked together to figure out the purpose and the function of aquifers.

After identifying the difference in groundwater and surface water, we used well simulators to see how remediation supplies help filter contaminated water. This also demonstrated on a small scale how much energy would be needed in order to obtain enough water for our use.

Working together on different aquifer kits, our members were able to identify the preferred locations to extract water from and why. Surface water is more easily accessible, but also more easily contaminated over groundwater. Our members were able to identify different reasons as to why we need aquifers and why groundwater is our main source of water.

Water conservation and energy efficiency is important for our environment, and will help us save money. In this workshop our members watched a short video on the World Water Crisis. They were able to discuss what major ways that the lack of water conservation can affect the world as a whole and as individuals. Energy conservation and efficiency was also discussed and together, our members came up with ways to conserve energy such as: disconnecting appliances and turning off the lights when a room is not being used, using LED light bulbs and solar panels.