Switching from a career in cosmetics to the muddy woods was one of the most rewarding decisions Ally Elder has made for her life. Marian Coensgen also abandoned the needles to work with the shovels. To them, it is worth it, for they know they are making a greater impact on the world.
Amigos de Los Rios (“friends of the river” in Spanish) is a non-profit organization that plants shrubs and native plants to preserve the wildlife and provide habitat restoration for all the parks lined along the Los Angeles River.
Amigos is part of the Emerald Necklace, centered around the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo River Watersheds, connecting all the parks throughout the region. The watershed eventually flows to the ocean.
Project Manager Matt O’Brien said the Emerald Necklace in Los Angeles was designed by the sons of the first landscape architect in the United States, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted designed Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston.
Starting in the 1970s with the green infrastructure goal, Amigos receive about 20 to 170 volunteers each Saturday, where they go to help preserve the nature.
Those volunteers are welcomed by both a former and current Citrus College student.
Elder, 23, finished her studies at Citrus as a cosmetology major, but ended up in the forestry and wildland resources program after taking professor Robert Goodman’s environmental science class.
“I’ve always been into environmental science, but I kinda fell into cosmetology,” Elder said. “I’m so glad that I did (join the program), because I think it’s super important to do environmental research and conservation.”
Goodman gives the opportunity for his students to get extra credit if they volunteer for Amigos.
“My first goal is to get them out there volunteering. The extra credit points is just an incentive,” Goodman said. “Once you’ve done it, then it becomes easier and then some students kinda get addicted to it and they want to continue giving it back.”
Goodman feels proud that his students continue contributing to the world after taking his forestry classes.
“It’s an amazing feeling that a lot of the students continue working and volunteering with the organizations that have a relationship with Citrus College,” Goodman said. “For all of us to be good stewards of the land is the goal.”
With the incentive and recommendation of Goodman, Elder is now the landscape support specialist of Amigos de Los Rios. Her job is to plant and maintain the flora at Peck Road Park.
“I get to walk around nature and just work at a park all day long, and it’s so peaceful and amazing,” Elder said. “I love being part of this program and a part of what these people do here.”
She also works as a volunteer coordinator on Saturdays and teaches other volunteers how to plant for themselves.
“I think what Amigos de Los Rios is doing is huge, just educating people on what the facts are and what you can do to help out,” Elder said. “There is a lot of simple steps you can take just starting from where you are at, taking one step at a time.”
One of Elder’s goals was to work in agriculture. Her passion for the nature started when she was a child since she grew up with lots of pets and has a grandmother who grew up on a farm.
“That’s actually a big part of what they do in the forestry program,” Elder said.
Although Elder has a cosmetology license, after graduating in Fall 2019 in the forestry program, she plans to transfer to California State University, Pomona, to join the animal science program and minor in agriculture.
Coensgen also witnessed a career change when she started performing outside after years working inside a laboratory. She finished the forestry program at Citrus on December 2015.
Before going back to a community college, Coensgen was a cancer research specialist at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for 29 years. When the laboratory was shut down, Coensgen decided to do a career change.
“I had been working with Amigos, and it was through Amigos that I decided I wanted to get more education,” Coensgen said.
Coensgen has a degree in laboratory biology and has always been interested in the environment.
Her involvement began when her son got an internship with Amigos when he started studying wildlife at Humboldt State University.
“I’ve had some ornithology like, 30 years ago. … I helped him on weekends when I could and I would help him swot his data,” Coensgen said. “We fell in love with the whole field.”
Even after the project was over, Coensgen continued doing the work for a year while volunteering on Saturdays and taking professor Goodman’s forestry class.
When Coensgen decided to dedicate her work to the environment, she thought she would work for government agencies instead.
“But the way the government is working these days, where you make a difference is a lot through non-profits or smaller organizations,” Coensgen said.
Coensgen is now one of the main people responsible for the function of Amigos. She is the project associate, habitat restoration associate and volunteer coordinator of Amigos de Los Rios.
As a volunteer coordinator, Coensgen enjoys teaching the volunteers about the benefits of the trees. She tells them that they produce oxygen, provide food, sugar, shade and habitat for wildlife, sequester carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas that once eliminated from the trees by deforestation, goes to the atmosphere and contributes to global warming) etc.
“I try to show some level of the interconnectedness of the environment and how are we dependent on it,” Coensgen said.
Coensgen’s ultimate goal is to teach students how to care for the environment they live in by teaching them how to plant for themselves.
“I want to work alongside them,” Coensgen said. “I do want to get dirty, but I also want to encourage them to correct their own mistakes and to learn from the situation.”
Coensgen cares about educating those people because she does not believe it is healthy to live in cities that are “full of asphalt and concrete.”
“If you think about how long people have existed and where they’ve been, they haven’t spend the majority of their time inside,” Coensgen said. “We’re not really adapted to be inside all the time. We do need to be outside. We need to treasure outside and we need to understand that we are totally part of the environment. We’re dependent on it.”
Amigos meet 9 to 12 p.m. every Saturday at different parks and high school locations. They provide the hand tools, such as shovels and pickaxes, and are very welcoming to those who want to make a change in the world. For more information, visit https://amigosdelosrios.org.
