"At Frontline Catalysts, we see Earth Day as a time to honor the deep connection our communities have with the land, water, and one another. For generations, communities of color have cared for the earth in ways that reflect resilience, creativity, and love. This April, we will empower Fruitvale’s frontline youth to partake in this tradition and play a central role in direct climate action. Our vision for this event is to collaborate with our partner schools, United for Success Academy and Life Academy, to have teachers of various grade levels bring their students on a walking field trip to Peralta Hacienda Historical Park. There, our four CCAC fellows will lead the youth through different zones. Our first zone will be for trash pick up, where students will walk around the park with grabbers and compostable bags to collect the heavy amounts of trash that tend to gather on the grass, gardens, and surrounding areas. In the art zone, students can either paint rocks that will beautify and stabilize the bank of Peralta Creek to avoid further erosion, or paint and decorate signage for trash cans to encourage proper disposal and thereby reduce waste at the park. Our third zone will encourage youth to engage in community greening, by continuing our restoration work at Peralta Creek and having students weed, plant native plants, and prepare the land surrounding the creek for our tree planting event taking place the week after. Finally, we will have a zone dedicated to providing resources to students and connecting them with environmental actions taking place in Oakland, to empower them to take climate action beyond Earth Day. In order to make the activities more engaging for our young participants, we will quantify their work to enter them into a raffle, where they can win one of four $25 gift cards. For example, each bag of trash or weeds will earn them one ticket to enter the raffle. The outcomes for this event will be increased greening and beautification at our partner site, Peralta Hacienda Historical Park, an important but often underfunded and unattended green space. The surrounding community is predominantly low-income, and our partner schools are located a 5 minute walk away, but we have received feedback from teachers and students alike that they haven’t felt comfortable spending time at one of the only green spaces available to them due to the trash and lack of maintenance. With our event, we hope to beautify the space so it serves the nearby community, as well as continue our work of restoring the creek through the planting of native plant species that effectively stabilize the banks, help decrease erosion, and build strong ecosystems. A secondary outcome for this event is for students to learn and take part in climate action to directly benefit their community, which is central to our organization's mission. "