$600k grant seeks to diversify workforce at River Bend, beyond

Minnesota demographics are shifting, but the workforce in some industries haven’t followed suit.

That’s an issue for the conservation field, argues River Bend Nature Center Executive Director Brad Bourn, who leads the 743-acre nature preserve in Faribault that received $600,000 of grant funding from the Department of Employment and Economic Development to introduce underrepresented communities to Bourn’s field of work through December 2025.

“As Minnesota is becoming more and more diverse, we need to cultivate a workforce of folks that are overcoming some barriers to entry in conservation careers, which there’s a lot of,” Bourn said.

Last year , River Bend employed six Somali teenagers for the summer using seed funding from the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. The program was intended to address a disparity between the population and the conservation workforce, as well as the visitors of the park.

This year, the youth-employment program is still happening, but at a grander scale. There are 17 youths employed this summer, thanks to grant funding from SMIF again. This time around, funding from the Union Pacific Railroad Foundation is also supporting this program.

“A summer job has influence on what you do the next summer, and the next summer, and the next summer,” Bourn said. “So we’re really hoping to create a linear pathway and a system that a lot of folks in the Faribault’s Somali and Latinx community just haven’t had access to. Because they haven’t had access to those systems and those networks and haven’t had that exposure.”

Bourn said the current way people become interested in conservation is through a parent or mentor, but that can have unintended consequences that this program is meant to amend.

“It’s often curated by somebody else,” he said. “Like, a parent that has a passion for something that says ‘Hey, maybe you should major in this in school.’ And then a professor at college says ‘You should try this internship at this nature center or this park.’ And while that mechanism is really good and it cultivates a lot of environmental stewards, it’s very easy for it to become unintentionally closed off to other people.”

The ultimate goal is for those youths’ summer jobs to turn into part-time jobs, then full-time careers in the conservation field, said Bourn. It might take a few years though, as he explained.

“System change always takes a really long time,” he said. “But doing this work year after year after year, I think eventually we’ll start to move that needle and we’ll start to see that that macro problem start to change a little bit as, all of a sudden, we do have BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) leaders that are coming into the conservation field with six or seven years of experience, from high school up through the end of college, because somebody helps expose them to that path.”

Next step

The DEED grant is for workforce development, and can serve as that next step for the youth in the summer-job program.

“My hope is that the kids in this program this summer, next year when they’re turning 17, 18 years old, that they can … go and say I learned this I’m ready to take the next step,” Bourn said.

The new program is for up to 50 adults, preferably age 18-24, who have faced barriers to enter the field. Participants can take two career pathways at River Bend.

The first is one-off courses to acquire certifications in various outdoor specializations, like shade-tree identification or pesticide application. The pathway is offered in partnership with the University of Minnesota, and ends with the successful participants becoming a Minnesota Master Naturalist.

“That prepares you to be in a nature center or a state park and start to identify different species of plant and animal life, different biomes, different environmental impacts that we’re experiencing,” Bourn said. “It’s a really nice introductory course for folks that really takes kind of some of the mystique or mystery out of the work.”

The second pathway was described as “very similar to the program that we’re doing right now with the youth.” It would essentially offer a job for 14 adults in the spring, summer and early fall of 2025, which gives experience and also comes with some certifications down the line.

“That will give folks just a really good foundation,” he said. “Like ‘Hey, I have done 500 hours worth of work in a nature-based setting and I’m prepared to go to a park district and say that I know how to do these fundamental pieces at the start of a job.’”

Bourn added that it also is nice to have 20-40 seasonal employees that don’t impact the budget.

“We’re getting natural-resource work done that we wouldn’t have the resources to do otherwise,” he said. “All the while, people are learning valuable skills that will help open doors for them and career paths in conservation, if that’s what they choose.”

Fostering interest

15-year-old Salman Ali is a part of the youth program at River Bend this summer. On Tuesday, he was pulling the invasive plant, buckthorn, for his fourth day on the job.

“My experience here has been great,” he said. “I’m having fun.”

15-year-old Abdinasir Hussein is also in the program. He said he already wants to be a naturalist — he would also like to be a professional soccer player — when he grows up.

“It’s amazing; I love it,” he said of the job. “It’s animals and nature, and I love nature. I go outside every day just to be in nature. And now, I get to help nature too.”

The feeling expressed by Hussein is what Bourn hopes the program can cultivate in even more people.

“Again, it’s just really important,” he said. “As the state of Minnesota diversifies, if our conservation workforce isn’t, we’re going to very quickly be running into the same kind of shortages that a lot of other industries experience down the road. And like, who’s going to care?

“Who’s going to remove buckthorn in 20 years, if we’re not here to do it and if our population just looks different, and we’re not cultivating that interest? It’s just a huge deal for River Bend and Somali Community Resettlement Services. We’re really excited to be recognized by the state of Minnesota to have the right team in place to do the work.”