Glaciers To Boy & Girls Club: A Shaker Heights Resident's Journey

SHAKER HEIGHTS, OH — Monica Marshall may be the new environmental manager for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland, a new position overseeing nature-based initiatives, but her journey to Northeast Ohio included plenty of glaciers. Which isn't a metaphor. Marshall literally went to Alaska to study glaciers.

After graduating Euclid High School in 2011, she matriculated to Alaska Pacific University, a small liberal arts college in Anchorage. She was there to study big, big ice.

“I wanted to study glaciers,” Marshall said. “I found out pretty quickly that glaciers are hard to study.”

Undeterred by glaciers' complicated nature, Marshall was quickly known as "the green girl" on her tiny campus. She got hands-on with nature. She helped start farms with Native Alaskans and became an activist, protecting natural resources. She advocated for a sockeye salmon fishery threatened by a proposed copper and gold mine.

She eventually graduated with a double major in environmental studies and psychology before moving back to Cleveland. She then found work at the Lake Erie Science & Nature Center and the Footpath Foundation, where she helped run the Footpath Nature Club sessions in Cleveland and Lorain County.

In her previous positions, she learned how to prepare lesson plans for kids and how to engage them with nature. She will now coordinate programming at the Morgana Bluffs Nature Preserve and Learning Center, which is located next to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Cleveland's Broadway Club.

“My main thing is getting kids excited about exploring nature,” said Marshall, who now lives in Shaker Heights.