Member Spotlight: Samantha Atripaldi

I pulled into the parking lot next to Clackamas Community College in Oregon City having been warned by multiple people that the Environmental Learning Center (ELC) where Samantha worked would be a bit hard to find.

Sure enough, I almost walked right by it – an observatory nestled into the trees at the edge of campus, next to a pleasantly rustic little building with a sign out front announcing that I’d made it to the right place.

I was fortunate enough to get a walking tour from Samantha while I learned about the area. It’s big enough to feel like you’re on a walk through the forest, but “not big enough that the kids [on field trips] can get too lost.” It’s just the right size for a full-on conservation effort to take place on campus, where artists can paint, horticultural students can get their hands dirty (for credit at CCC!), and local kids can come to get in touch with the environment. And even though I was visiting in the winter - certainly not the time when the ELC is most teeming with life - it was absolutely beautiful.

Samantha, serving as Watershed Health Educator, takes a lead role in community engagement here, bringing people from all walks of life to learn about the ELC’s lush variety of frogs, birds, and bugs and the importance of taking care of our streams. She currently hosts a weekly livestream where she teaches youth from here to Texas about healthy waterways. Her weeks are spent lesson planning, streaming, and bringing volunteers out to help remove invasive species in the nature area. Come summer, she’ll be hosting field trips where kids can get hands-on experience looking at plants and animals native to the area.

The ELC includes both forest and wetland environments and was created around the headwaters of Newell Creek, which is a drain for stormwater that originates on campus and in the surrounding areas. It is immediately apparent that it’s well taken care of – the water is as clear as any stream you’d find in the mountains. In fact, it’s so clean that on one educational trip the ELC found a species of snail which is low-pollution-tolerant living amongst the macroinvertebrates in the stream bed. This means that wildlife that wouldn’t be able to thrive elsewhere in the greater Portland area can find a home at CCC – an absolutely huge environmental impact and a major step to repairing our wetland environments.

Confluence is thrilled to have joined the effort by bringing on CCC as a new partner for our 22-23 cohort, and we’re absolutely amazed by the volume of community engagement and service that Samantha has been able to do in just the first few months of service. Congratulations to Samantha & CCC on all their hard work, and we look forward to more amazing things in the coming months!