Following her passion for the environment, 17-year-old Alondra Alonso of East Los Angeles joined 21 other teens at Cal Sate Northridge on Saturday as part of the National Park Service’s SAMO Youth crew.

“In East Los Angeles, we don’t have much nature around us besides the trees and the flora,” said Alonso, who recently graduated from James A. Garfield High School in East L.A. and will major in environmental science at Dartmouth College. “I just thought it would be nice to get away and be in the Santa Monica mountains around our communities. So I applied and luckily I got the job.”

Alonso was one of 22 teens from Los Angeles and Oxnard high schools who were gardening and composting on the Northridge campus with students from the school’s Institute for Sustainability. The teens have been gaining paid, on-the-job experience this summer in a variety of outdoor trades.

“Last week we were in Los Angeles at Garfield High School and doing work at the garden there and there was a lot of interaction with people,” Alonso said.

Joey Algiers, a restoration ecologist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, said the teens work for eight weeks in the Santa Monica Mountains and Channel Islands National Park in a variety of areas in addition to working outside of the mountains such as in Northridge.

“So today, we have youth that are clearing around some of the vegetation and trying to create space and just doing basic maintenance on the campus garden,” Algiers said. “This garden was worked on a couple of years ago by SAMO youth and it’s grown quite a bit. It’s a fantastic resource for the students that go here so we’re happy to be a part of beautifying it.”

National Park Service officials said the SAMO Youth program began in 2000 and has seen 175 high school and college students from inner-city L.A. and Oxnard graduate.

Antonio Solorio, a National Park Service park ranger and the SAMO youth program manager, said the program is an effort to “better represent the beautiful diversity that makes up the American people” by specifically reaching out to diverse youths from Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Alonso said the diversity aim of the National Park Service was an important one.

“My community is predominantly Latino and a lot of us don’t go out to national parks because either we don’t know that they’re available or we don’t feel comfortable,” Alonso said. “My parents, they only speak Spanish, so they’re very timid to go out to places. But by making it more diverse and knowing there are people who speak different languages, it makes it very inclusive and people are going to feel welcomed.”