"YABES," who?
YABES is an advocacy group centered in the Youth Advisory Board (hence the YAB part), working with the District Attorney to get our community into shape!
Environmental Sustainability and Food Security is the focus for us.
In theory, we are simply a bunch of teenagers ready to save our planet.
Why Advocacy matters
From maintaining ecosystem biodiversity to maintaining oceans for our posterity, it is important that we prioritize our planet.
YABES has generated short informational videos that dive into the harmful decisions that affect our planet and how you can make a change.
We have also provided informational posters in our environmental sustainability tab. Please take the time to read them.
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What we've been up to
Our Nature Walk
"Nature reminds us that there is a sense of harmony we as humans are responsible for maintaining. Please remember how nature takes care of us through systems with organisms such as fungi, plants, mammals. We are privileged to live in Massachusetts, where plants and animals thrive. Let’s keep them thriving! " -ZK
"At the nature walk in forest park I learned so much! It was so interesting to learn the names of different plants and animals that I’ve never thought about before. I thought that it was especially cool that plants of the same species could look like many different things while remaining in the same plant family. This nature walk definitely gave me a better perspective about the environment around me!" -KA
While going out for a nature walk the first thing we noticed were red robins. It was slightly difficult to take photos of them since they kept moving away. After a while we walked to another location and as we were doing so, I took pictures of two trees: one being a pine tree, and the other the app couldn’t identify the species. Once we had stopped at our next location to look around I found this red seed with spikes, both amazed and curious, I took a picture; it was an American sweet gum seed. In the area we were looking in, we noticed a trail leading deeper in the forest. There I scanned a fungi and a plant but they couldn’t identify that neither, however, the genus of the fungi was Trichaptum and the genus of the plant was kalmia. After we returned to where we started, we decided to head towards the pond. We watched the mallard ducks interact with each other. It was pretty funny to watch them chase each other. Then it was time to part ways, but a week later when I was going to forest park I saw a deer under the entrance bridge and I watched it walk around for a bit. -SD
Our Initiatives
Knowledge Sharing and Learning
We want to provide knowledge as well as soak it in. We have created posters and videos alongide exploring nature for ourselves!
Staying safe
When cleaning your local area, make sure to have the proper equipment as displayed here. We were equipped with trash bags, buckets, gloves, litter pickers, and safety vests through the help of Keep Massachusetts Beautiful!
Bonding during cleaning our environment
We participated in community cleanup in order to keep our environments pristine. This was through Keep Massachusetts Beautiful!
Cleaning our communities
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We collected waste ranging from plastic to (too many) cigarette butts!
Please remember that cigarette butts are extremely harmful to the environment.
