WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Text in this post was edited for clarity on August 24th.
I spoke with founder of Yellowwood Youth, Josie Sparks, who will be a high school senior this year and has spent the past year working endlessly to get to this point.
Yellowwood Youth was a result of the work that Sparks did for Project Green Challenge, which is an international environmental education challenged by Turning Green. It includes 30 days of challenges, each with the intent to enlighten, educate and inspire high school, college and grad students with environmentally-themed challenges to do each day for the duration of one month.
Last year, PGC welcomed over 11,000 participants from 73 different countries, Sparks being one of them.
Sparks ended up being one of the finalists to get a chance to go to California and work with Turning Green. When she applied, she also had to propose a climate action project.
Sparks created Yellowwood Youth with the help of Beth Rattner and Nicola Salzman. The goal of the nonprofit organization is to “provide quality education, resources, and opportunities to young people in Indiana in relation to the environment and the climate.”
She explains how the organization began and her vision for its future:
“I thought I’d have to move to California to make any headway in this, and I was like, I’m going to have to go to college there and get this good education in it and that’s the only way I’m going to be successful in this topic. And that’s a complete lie. There is hundreds of groups in Indiana doing this work, there are thousands of people in Indiana that this is their focus.”
She went on to say, “Every little town has these gardening clubs, every little school has their Eco club. It might only have five people and they might never start an initiative, but if you can reach out to them, you can help them do that. If I can give them contacts that we make a data base of then you can do that. The idea is designing things that I want to see, that I wish I had.”
Since October, Yellowwood has been working on many ideas and projects, one of them being the Bloomington shoe strike. Sparks explained in detail what a shoe strike means and how it works saying,
“Basically it’s a way to have climate activism and a climate strike without being in person. It’s also a donation event for helping the local community.”
She said that boxes will be marked at specific locations around Bloomington, where people can donate shoes in the boxes, and they will then be collected by a group of set people and laid out in a field/parking lot in a “strike” where each pair of shoes represents a person that would have attended that climate strike.
People can donate their shoes at their convenience starting September 4th through the 6th and also September 11th through the 13th. Times and dates may be subject to change but will be published on Yellowwood Youth’s social media pages and website closer to the month.
The specific locations right now for donating are St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, the Bloomington Friends Meetinghouse, The Warehouse, and Global Gifts.
Yellowwood has reached out to Soles 4 Souls, Middle Way House, Opportunity House, and Indiana Recovery Alliance to help take the shoes and repurpose them.
Sparks explained the inspiration behind the strike, which started in Sweden, but she said she saw it first in West Lafayette, Indiana from a student-led shoe strike that happened on July 21st. The team collected 250 pairs of shoes in total and donated them to Soles 4 Soles to “be used as humanitarian aid around the world.”
When asked why shoes? Sparks said that there are many reasons why shoes are a good way for environmentalists to express their emotions for taking care of the environment and also help people who are heavily affected by climate change.
“Each pair of shoes is a representation of a person who would go to the strike, but you can donate as many pairs as you want. And so the other meaning behind the shoes is the miles that climate refugees have to travel. So a lot of them don’t have shoes that they risk personal harm trying to escape their home and trying to find a better place to live and they’re often turned away. They’re hurt in the process, they die in the process. So each pair of shoes does not just represent a person from our community, it represents one of those people that has had to leave their home and try to find a life somewhere else because of climate disasters that we have an impact on, so that’s the meaning behind that I see… For me that is a lot more meaningful and more connecting our community to theirs and making people also think about other people. That it’s not just how can we show up here and show that we care, but that we recognize that, we are a privileged community and in terms of Indiana we do see impacts, we definitely do, and some people don’t believe that we do, but we don’t see them in the same way, we aren’t impacted in the same way. Some people are impacted in certain ways you know if you think about heat levels, and apartment buildings, and that they have higher risks of heat stroke and heart attack and things like that, so we definitely see it in Indiana but for a lot of us, we’re privileged that we don’t have to see it at all. And so you never see those people unless it’s on a Time magazine.”
For more information on the strike and other projects, you can contact Sparks and the team at Yellowwoodyouth.org.
