Written by Tori Auger, high school River Ranger at The Greenway Foundation, age 16
Jolon Clark is the Denver City Councilman for “Lucky” District Seven. He describes himself as an elected representative for the municipal government of the City and County of Denver. In this role, he gets to tackle city-wide issues with the rest of the council and also specific issues brought to him by individual people and groups. His job mainly consists of meeting in groups to discuss public issues and working directly with people to try and find creative, practical, and realistic solutions.
Councilman Clark never planned on going into government. His undergraduate training is in environmental education with a bachelor’s degree in natural resources and a master’s degree in nonprofit management. He had always planned to work in the nonprofit world doing hands-on work related to the environment. While pursuing this career path, he became involved in helping communities along the South Platte River with projects like building parks. Eventually, he moved into one of these neighborhoods and was appointed to serve on the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board by his district’s city councilperson. Here he got to vote on issues of public interest which was his first experience with the kind of work he does now. His work during this time got him more deeply embedded in his community, so when his district’s city councilperson retired, people encouraged him to run. Although he had never set out to be in public office, he took their advice and after an enthusiastic campaign he became the city councilman for District Seven.
Councilman Clark originally found his calling as a high school student working at the Balarat Outdoor Education Center, where he taught younger children about nature on a beautiful stretch of land in the Rockies. Despite Balarat’s importance in starting his career, Councilman Clark says his time working for the Greenway Foundation, an amazing nonprofit focusing on the South Platte River and environment education, was the biggest building block in getting him where he is today. Much of his work at the Greenway revolved around building up their summer camp, SPREE. In this program, kids can learn about the environment and nature while spending time playing and catching small, native wildlife in the South Platte and Cherry Creek. After this, Councilman Clark did more general community and park based projects. He says the opportunity to work deeply in a community to help them revitalize and use their parks and other resources was a fantastic experience and helped lead to how he helps communities today. Councilman Clark’s favorite thing about being a city councilperson is getting to directly help people. In his job, he helps solve a wide variety of issues. Constituents come to him with everything from small issues like their trash didn’t get picked up that week to big issues like there aren't enough COVID19 vaccines available so their parents can’t get vaccinated, and he gets to help them all. Some people only need to be put in contact with the right person to resolve their issue while others require more problem solving and action on his part. In these cases, Councilman Clark loves to participate in the process or event devised to solve these problems. Another of his favorite aspects of his job is that every day on the city council is different. Some days he could be talking about runways at the airport, some days it might be COVID19 vaccines, and some days he’s brainstorming ideas and dreams for how an abandoned rubber factory could be made into something spectacular.
Councilman Clark says that because every day is so different, it’s hard to describe a “typical” day. The constants are Monday nights when he attends the council meeting addressing business of the city, and Tuesday and Wednesday committee meetings. However, in between he has many in-person and virtual meetings of his own with constituents, city agencies, or citizens who want to walk with him to show him the issues they are seeing in their parks and neighborhoods. Once an issue is brought to him, he works with his team to help to collaborate with the community, other councilpeople, and different agencies to create a feasible plan of attack for the issue at hand. The best piece of advice Councilman Clark has for someone interested in this field is to follow their passion. He says if you really care about something and are willing to work hard, opportunities will open up and the rest will fall into place.
Councilman Clark cites the CAEE as a valuable resource to learn about a variety of organizations and job opportunities in the environmental field. There is also a job section on the City and County of Denver website to explore which has a wide variety of job postings including jobs in parks and animal shelters, city planning positions, and jobs working with issues like homelessness. In closing, Councilman Clark suggests keeping an open mind about career possibilities and creating relationships with people whose work you find interesting because this will open a lot of doors to things you may enjoy.
