Meet Our New AmeriCorps VISTA Member, Emma!

To ring in the new year, we welcomed Emma Belanger as our new AmeriCorps VISTA

Outreach and Communications Coordinator! Emma will be working to build Green Living Science’s capacity to educate our community about recycling initiatives in Detroit through building outreach materials, managing our social media and newsletters, and supporting each member of our team and our programming efforts.

Growing up, Emma discovered a passion for the natural world and a deeply ingrained curiosity for it through experiencing the lands of the Peoria, Anishinaabe, Potawatomi, Wyandot, and Mississauga people, going on camping trips with their family, hiking in the woods of metro Detroit, and swimming in the Great Lakes. From a young age, they knew that they wanted to work towards a future where not only our more-than-human kin could thrive but also where our human communities could live healthy, abundant lives. In middle school science classes, Emma admired the subject’s ability to bring them closer to understanding plants, animals, and the planet, and it was then that they knew they wanted to pursue a career fusing science and their love for the living world. As the first in their family to attend college, they had the great honor of studying along the shores of Lake Michigan at Northwestern University, graduating with a BA in Environmental Sciences and Neurosciences in 2021. They went on to serve with CivicSpark, an AmeriCorps program, on Pomo lands of rural northern California, where they helped a local government create an outreach program aimed at increasing community stewardship of the largest freshwater lake in the state. This experience enabled them to more clearly see the relationship between education and ecological care, where connecting communities to resources and information can empower them to act in reciprocity with their local ecosystems, while responding to environmental injustices that threaten human health, safety, and accessibility of outdoor spaces. 

To delve deeper into environmental education, Emma went on to pursue an M.Ed. in Science Instruction and Curriculum on the lands and waters of the Coast Salish Nations at the University of Washington, specializing in place-based and outdoor education. For this degree, they completed a teaching residency at an outdoor school outside of Seattle, where they wrote and implemented experiential science curriculum and co-created learning environments with the plants, animals, and other non-human actors who taught them and their groups of students with a lot of patience and joy. Witnessing communities driven by sustainable policy implementation and being a part of justice-oriented science education programming, backdropped by the temperate rainforests, mountains, and colossal waterways of the Pacific Northwest, gave them a newfound appreciation for just how interwoven ecosystems can be to our human communities. Moreover, they began to more clearly articulate their pedagogical philosophy that education is a means to the collective goal of liberation for all Earthly beings; for us all to feel empowered to live in love, care, and reciprocity; for us to be oriented to pursuits of justice, interconnection, and joy; and for us to find and share with authenticity our unique stories, cultures, and identities. In the summer of 2025, they happily succumbed to the call of the Great Lakes and returned to Michigan, ready to help  embolden the people here to care for their environment and one another. 

In their role with Green Living Science, Emma is excited to join our team and provide essential support to our youth, community, and business programming. A creative spirit, Emma is ready to create cogent and beautiful outreach materials to promote recycling and waste reduction in the city, and they look forward to collaborating with our partners and the community to find and tell important stories of the impacts of our work. 

When not working behind the scenes of GLS, Emma can be found reading or listening to audiobooks, writing speculative fiction short stories and poems, making art, exploring local green spaces, or enjoying quality time with friends and family!

If you want to see more of Emma's educational work, check out their website at https://emmabelanger7.wixsite.com/enviroedu. They are excited to jump into this work and welcome anyone interested in connecting to reach out to them at emma@greenlivingscience.org!