On a sunny afternoon in October 2024, an energetic group of elementary school students crowded around laminated leaves arrayed on an outdoor table. “Red Maple! Red Maple!” shouted one, pointing to a leaf’s crimson stem. “Dogwood!” yelled another, proudly raising her leaf in the air. “Boxelder, right?” wondered another student, examining a trio of small leaflets.

Native tree identification was just one of the hands-on activities pursued by the children in the Tree Heroes Club, an afterschool 21st Century Community Learning Center (CCLC) program supported by the eeBLUE 21st CCLC Watershed STEM Education Partnership Grant program. The club is the latest element in a longstanding collaboration between Boxerwood Education Association—a rural grassroots nonprofit based in Lexington, Virginia—and a 21st CCLC site located at Enderly Heights Elementary School in the nearby town of Buena Vista. The site is called BEST (Blues [Enderly’s mascot] Excelling in Skills and Talents), a much-loved afterschool and summer enrichment program for Buena Vista children.

Beyond its partnership with BEST, the Tree Heroes club is also part of a larger collaboration between Boxerwood and Buena Vista, called BV Cool Trees. The goal of this separately-funded initiative is to increase the urban tree canopy in town by planting 250+ trees over the next three years. Beyond the valuable ecological and economic benefits of an expanded canopy, the project is also designed to fortify the civic and environmental engagement of Buena Vista citizens by empowering community members of all ages. In other words, the initiative is designed to grow eco-literate citizens while also growing trees. Connecting this project to Boxerwood’s 21st CCLC eeBLUE partnership was a natural fit.

This past fall the Tree Heroes club helped advance the project by maintaining the BV Cool Trees tree nursery located on their school’s property. As part of club activities, young students carried buckets of wood mulch to cover the pathways between nursery beds, and they helped to weed and neaten other areas. In keeping with eeBLUE STEM goals, they also connected with a working scientist, Dr. Samuel Hirt, an ecologist at Southern Virginia University (SVU). During some of the club’s final weeks, club members visited the SVU college campus—a new experience for many. As part of his outreach, Dr. Hirt first organized a rigorous leaf identification activity that found students running from tree to tree through a large section of campus. During a second visit, he demonstrated how to measure the circumference of a trunk and how scientists use these measurements in their fieldwork. The young Tree Heroes dashed between towering oaks and magnolias, shouting their measurements proudly at each site.

Beyond the Tree Heroes club, this eeBLUE grant supports two other STEM initiatives for BEST kids this year. The first is a spring 2025 after-school club, called Storm Chasers, in which students will learn how weather phenomena affect Buena Vista and specifically their schoolyard, culminating in an action project to help “slow the flow” of stormwater run-off. The second is a summer 2025 BEST camp that will explore the connection between trees and watershed health, and will be guided by the question, “How do trees in our community help humans and wildlife?”

As the eeBLUE activities unfold throughout the year, we continue to be inspired by the Tree Heroes of last fall. As a culminating project, the group planted the very first trees of the BV Cool Trees project: two red maples on their very own schoolyard. Assisting them was a group of Buena Vista high school students who had helped launch BV Cool Trees the previous summer. As the teenagers dug holes and helped the younger children cradle the saplings into their new homes, we witnessed a community engaging not just with trees, but with each other—young people planting the seeds of care, empowerment, and resilience.