Published on 2025-03-27 by Adora Thao
By Adora Thao, who served as a youth Intern and crew member at Urban Roots in 2024
(Introduction by Meredith Keller, MSP LTER Program & Communications Manager)
Introduction
Partner Spotlight is a new series within our twice-annual City Buzz Newsletter that offers MSP LTER community and government partners an opportunity to introduce themselves and discuss their collaborative work with us. For our first issue, we invited Adora Thao to share her experience working at Urban Roots as a youth intern and crew member, and reflect on her partnership with the MSP LTER’s Science Deep Dive internship program.
Since 2022, the MSP LTER Urban Contaminants Team has collaborated with Urban Roots to test its sites for contaminants such as heavy metals and microplastics, as well as to investigate potential remediation strategies. You can learn more about these collaborative research efforts below and by reading Lindsey Kemmerling’s (postdoctoral researcher with the Urban Contaminants Team) blog post “Diving Deep into Collaborative Research: Our Partnership with Urban Roots” (Spring 2025).
What is the mission/vision/values of Urban Roots? What is its history?
This section was written with help from Urban Roots Conservation Program Director, David Woods:
Urban Roots’ mission is to cultivate and empower youth through nature, healthy food, and community. Our vision is a world where all communities have unlimited access to nature and healthy food. The following core values guide our work:
- Collaboration: Together we can achieve more than we can acting alone.
- Stewardship: Communities will be healthy when we inspire residents to understand, respect, and conserve the natural environment.
- Inclusion: Diversity and inclusivity strengthen every aspect of our organization.
- Experiential Learning: Opportunities for hands-on discovery will help youth and communities engage and grow.
Urban Roots was founded in 1969 to empower community residents to realize their goals for better health, wellbeing, and economic opportunity. Since 1996, our food and environmental programs on the East Side of St. Paul have engaged thousands of low-income youth in education, training, and work projects—benefiting the community, developing young leaders, and improving health and the environment. Today, Urban Roots operates as a youth development organization and one of the largest youth employers on the East Side of St. Paul. Our youth internship program—spanning Conservation, Market Garden, and Cook Fresh tracks—engages up to 80 youth (ages 14-21) from under-resourced communities on St. Paul’s East Side each year. We offer paid internships through a progressive model providing interns the chance to increase hours, pay, responsibilities, and leadership roles each year they return. Participants gain confidence, 21st-century job skills, and hands-on STEM learning experiences, preparing them to discover strengths, realize new opportunities, graduate high school, and set post-secondary education and employment goals.
What is your role at Urban Roots?
For nearly four years, I worked in the Market Garden program at Urban Roots. I began as a regular youth intern, then was promoted to a crew lead in my second year. As a crew lead, my role was to lead and support youth, while engaging them in tasks and relationship-building activities. I was also the bridge between youth interns and staff, experiencing both roles and acting as a messenger between those roles. For example, if staff had announcements or questions for the youth, I would share that with the youth, then send back the youth responses, and vice versa. One thing very important to me during my time as a crew lead was acting as an advocate for the youth. I always centered our youth and remembered to be a safe space for them to learn and grow. Now that I have left Urban Roots, I hope this part of the job is still as important to the current crew leads.
How are Urban Roots and the MSP LTER collaborating?
We have been working with MSP LTER Urban Contaminants Team researchers, through Emilie Snell-Rood's lab and Cara Santelli's lab, to explore the ecological impacts of urban contaminants at Urban Roots’ Rivoli Bluffs Farm and Restoration Site. In 2022, MSP LTER researchers launched a partnership with the Urban Roots’ youth program where youth interns joined researchers in using lichen to monitor air quality, taking soil samples and collecting butterflies that were brought back to a lab for further analysis. In the second year of our partnership, Urban Roots and the MSP LTER received grant funding to launch a program we called "Science Deep Dive." This new internship program gave interested youth a chance to learn more about careers in scientific research and take part in a youth-designed research project at Rivoli Bluffs. In its second year (this past summer, 2024), we examined microplastic pollution in soils and explored how biochar could be used in remediation.
What are Urban Roots' plans and/or vision for the future?
Many of the places we work are former dump sites or other once-contaminated lands. We are really interested in continuing research on the extent of this contamination and exploring remediating contaminated soils—especially ways that involve the natural world in cleaning up the mess.
How can community members get involved with Urban Roots?
If folks would like to learn more about Urban Roots and get involved, they can check out its website. There are opportunities to volunteer, join the board, receive the newsletter, and learn about upcoming events.
About Adora Thao
Adora Thao is a full-time student at Century College pursuing a Liberal Arts degree. She plans to transfer to the University of Minnesota to major in either Plant and Microbial Biology or Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior within the College of Biological Sciences.