Making Life Better Through Education

Get Your High School Diploma Through FIELD’s EPIC Adult High School

It’s been a few months since I’ve stepped into the leadership role at FIELD and I can’t tell you how honored I was to preside over some of this year’s graduations. Our students’ stories are so inspiritng – from the mother of five who never thought a high school diploma was possible, to the hard working dad who always wanted to go back to school to be able to get a better job. I am so proud of the 160 or so students who graduated this year. This is why FIELD exists. To give our students and the community better opportunities to get ahead.

So what’s next? How do we continue to serve our communities in meaningful ways? It’s a question we ask ourselves at FIELD every day. To start, we’re focusing in on our own backyard in the County of Kern. It turns out Kern County has one of the highest percentages of residents in the state who don’t have a high school or equivalent diploma. A full 14% of unemployed adults in Kern County 25 years and older have not graduated from high school. Even more telling, 29% of people living at or below the poverty level in Kern County also lack a high school diploma.

That’s where FIELD will help fill the gap. This summer, we’re laser focused on outreach, recruitment, and enrollment in all regions for the fall semester. We are preparing for the upcoming EPIC school year and expanding our services in Kern to add more EPIC High School classes along with all the high touch servies that support students like our wonderful heroes who just graduated. 

This month I also wanted to highlight our exciting Cesar Chavez Environmental Corps and all the new services and partnerships we are developing in that program. As this program continues to expand, we will be able to serve even more students with needs that align with those services.

David Weaver, our director of FIELD’s Environmental Corps job training program, has been doing a terrific job of expanding the natural resource program since he took over the job in July of 2023. The Environmental Corps mandate is to train corpsmembers into restoring the natural environment, especially following wildfires, floods and other natural disasters. It also includes FIELD’s recycling program. He has some 100 corpsmembers in those programs, getting trained for future job opportunities.

The program, which began 14 years ago, is one of 14 certified local conservation corps in California. But they are also part of a nationwide program of training young adults into stewarding natural resources.

FIELD’s Conservation Corp has two broad departments – natural resources and recycling. Natural resources focuses on fire fuel reduction in local forests, trail work, tree planting, river restoration, habitat restoration, and non-native invasive species work. The recycling department focuses on recycling-related work and is funded primarily by the government-funded CalRecycle based in Sacramento. Our recycling arm includes beverage containers, e-waste, oil, tire collection and buy-back centers.

Some recent developments in the Environmental Corps include working with CalFIRE on fuel reduction programs in the Tehachapi Mountains as well as the Frasier & Pine Mountain Club areas. FIELD currently has two crews of eight members each at those locations. We’re also especially proud that the Corp is now partnering  with the National Park Service to upgrade and beautify the Chavez National Monument in Keene, CA. It was only fitting that our corpsmembers would be the ones to keep up the visitor center and gardens there in honor of our founder, Cesar Chavez.

We also work with the Cal State Parks where we have crews working on fire fuel reduction and restoration in areas devastated by fires including areas from Santa Cruz to Malibu/Calabasas. Our corpsmembers restore burned out wood bridges over creeks, and even melted water pipes. These project are all great training grounds for corpsmembers interested in going into a career in Natural Resources.

 On the recycling side, in addition to our ongoing recycling centers, FIELD has also just engaged with Bakersfield College and the County of Kern to expand its cardboard collection.

If this sounds interesting, or you have a family member in need, call or email us today!

Respectfully empowering the underserved, 

Nora Dominguez, Ed.D. 
Chief Operating Officer/FIELD