Employing Junior Rangers and Youth+ as team leaders for young summer workers

Young summer workers are employed at the nature reserve to help meet the added pressure of the tourism season. They help with repairs, cleaning litter, information, parking coordination, etc. This is a coordinated effort with the municipality to offer summer work to young people still in school. However, many of the young people employed have little or no experience of the nature reserve. Therefore a lot of time and effort from the staff of the nature reserve is needed to coordinate the work.

Although the effort with the summer workers were good, the quality of their work could be raised and the ordinary staff needed to be relieved of the added burden of managing the summer workers.

By using one of the certified guide companies of the area to supervise and coordinate the summer workers we could relieve the ordinary staff and by using older Junior Rangers / Youth+ as teamleaders for the group we could tap into their extensive knowledge of the area.

We reached out early in the spring to the guide company to ensure enough time to coordinate the project.

We used staff from the certified guide company Kullabergsguiderna for management and supervising and young people from Kullabergs Junior Rangers and Youth+ group as teamleaders.

With the help of the Junior Rangers / Youth+ the summer workers work effort have been used much more efficiently and by speeding up the communication with existing staff, action could be taken quicker to unforeseen problems.

Since summer is high season for the guide company, their time was extremely limited during the duration of the project and their main planning had to be done well in advance. Also establishing functional communication between ordinary nature reserve staff and teamleaders as well as teamleaders and supervising guide company (which was done using messenger groups).

By tapping into the Junior Ranger / Youth+ groups vast experience and using them, not only as ambassadors for the nature reserve, but also as spokespersons for empowered youth they proved to be the perfect teamleaders for the youth summer workers.