Applications Now Being Accepted for the UNITY Earth Ambassadors Program. Apply online HERE.

Written by Jessica McCool, UNITY Earth Ambassador and UNITY 25 Under 25 Award Recipient
For my Earth Day project, I helped to coordinate an Earth Day event with the Environmental Department I work for on the reservation to help spread awareness on these Earth-related issues. A lot of planning and organizing went into this. We had to pick a date that would be best to have it on, a place to have it (somewhere where it was most accessible to our target audience), activities that would be held there, food, and vendors.
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Nadira Mitchell, 14
Navajo
Tucs, Arizona

My name is Nadira Mitchell, I am 14 years old. I finished 8th grade at Utterback Middle Magnet School for the Arts and will be attending Tucson High School in the Fall as a freshman. I am Navajo (Dine) on my mom’s side and Anglo-American from my dad’s side. Helping the community through volunteering, doing community service, getting involved in extra-curricular activities at school and setting a goal and working hard at achieving my goal has helped me to become a better leader. I am a Junior Docent with the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Teen Conservation Leadership Corps, interpreting to visitors the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert and assisting with camps during the summer. I like science, music and photography and hope to combine all those as I continue to develop my leadership skills as a UNITY Earth Ambassador.

Xavier Medina, 16 
Pascua Yaqui
Tucson, Arizona

What I’ve done in the past to become a better steward of the environment is I have participated in community clean-ups and cemetery clean-ups. In the future i want to change policies for smoke free parks. An estimated 4.5 trillion of the annual 6 trillion cigarettes sold worldwide do not end up in a dust bin or ashtray, but are simply flicked away along roadside or on pavement. The ban on indoor smoking may have exacerbated this. (Source: Current Environmental Heath Reports) Also I’d like to raise awareness about the Rio Yaqui water rights issue.