BLM AZ Gila District Youth Internships and Public Land Corps Opportunities | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The BLM AZ Gila District Youth Internships and Public Land Corps Opportunities grant (Funding Opportunity Number L14AS00149) was a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) cooperative agreement intended to build partnerships that place young adults and recent college graduates into paid internships and Public Lands Corps-style positions across the BLM Gila District in Arizona. The larger idea behind the program was workforce development: giving participants practical, career-relevant experience in natural resource and recreation management while also helping the BLM complete priority fieldwork and monitoring tied to ongoing conservation and land management commitments. The Gila District emphasized that it had already been running similar youth engagement efforts for several years, and that those past interns gained both technical field skills (like seed collection, plant community inventories, and invasive species control) and professional skills (like project coordination, crew leadership, logistics, database reporting, and applying restoration and reclamation techniques).

The project objective centered on recruiting partners whose missions align with training and supervising early-career workers in four main focus areas: (1) resource monitoring and data collection, (2) recreation and visitor services, (3) fish and wildlife habitat restoration, and (4) border resources rehabilitation. Across these tracks, interns and crews were expected to support real BLM program needs and produce usable work products, not just general experience. The announcement specifically noted deliverables such as inventories, written reports, complete databases, maps, and GIS outputs like ArcGIS shapefiles. In practice, that means the work was designed to feed directly into BLM planning, compliance, and long-term monitoring systems, including GPS/GIS-based documentation and standardized data management.

A major portion of the work fell under multiple resource monitoring and data collection, reflecting the fact that the Gila District manages diverse landscapes and is actively implementing or updating Resource Management Plans (RMPs). The opportunity referenced RMP implementation for Ironwood Forest National Monument and Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, planning efforts for the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (within the Tucson Field Office), and an upcoming RMP revision for the Safford Field Office. These plans, along with existing Biological Opinions and Special Status Species obligations, drive a continual need for baseline inventories and recurring monitoring across hydrology, riparian systems, range, recreation, and fish and wildlife. Interns supporting this track could be involved in collecting field measurements, documenting conditions, helping manage datasets, and contributing to monitoring frameworks that inform decisions about water resources, habitat quality, visitor use, and land-use impacts.

Recreation and visitor services work was framed around practical on-the-ground stewardship of recreation sites and dispersed use areas. The BLM highlighted needs such as site and facility maintenance, interpretive improvements, trail and campground maintenance, and trash cleanup. For dispersed recreation, the BLM anticipated interns and youth crews helping develop and maintain trails and trailheads, producing or installing interpretive signs and brochures, and collecting data to improve mapping and documentation of recreation features. Wilderness monitoring was also identified as a potential assignment area, with goals like streamlining data collection protocols, improving wilderness signage, and implementing solutions that reduce or prevent unauthorized uses. The announcement also pointed to environmental education opportunities near local communities, suggesting that interns could build public-facing interpretation and outreach skills alongside field tasks.

Wildlife habitat restoration projects were described as variable across the district, but consistently hands-on and restoration focused. Potential activities included watershed restoration, wildlife and fisheries habitat improvement, fuels reduction, seed collection, sediment and erosion control, and public education and outreach related to restoration goals. Additional work items listed included installing or maintaining water developments, constructing fences and barriers or modifying/removing fences to improve habitat connectivity, route signing and route closure with associated site restoration, invasive weed removal, inventories of plants and wildlife, cultural site recordation, and stabilizing and rehabilitating areas impacted by wildland fire. Taken together, this track blended ecological restoration with practical land management infrastructure and monitoring tasks.

Border resources rehabilitation addressed impacts associated with illegal smuggling activity in affected areas, with an emphasis on documenting damage and carrying out rehabilitation actions. Work could include trash cleanup, repairing or installing barriers, fences, and cattle guards, rehabilitating unauthorized roads, implementing erosion control, installing signs, coordinating volunteer groups, and maintaining databases that track accomplishments. This part of the program combined resource protection, site repair, and administrative tracking, and it strongly emphasized measurable outputs and documentation.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity was categorized as a discretionary natural resources grant using a cooperative agreement instrument, signaling that BLM expected substantial involvement and coordination with the awardee during project execution. The posting date was June 13, 2014, with an application deadline of July 23, 2014, submitted electronically through Grants.gov by 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time (late submissions were not considered). The program anticipated up to three awards, with an estimated total funding amount of $900,000. The award ceiling was listed as $900,000 and the award floor as $25,000, indicating flexibility in project scale depending on partner capacity and proposed work. Eligibility was broadly open ("anyone"), but cost sharing was required: the announcement stated that BLM would pay no more than 75% of project costs, meaning the recipient would need to provide at least a 25% match.

Overall, the grant was designed to meet two goals at once: strengthening the next generation of conservation and public lands professionals through structured internships and youth crews, and helping the BLM Gila District complete high-priority monitoring, restoration, recreation site stewardship, and rehabilitation work. The skills emphasized throughout the announcement point to what BLM wanted participants to leave with: applied arid lands restoration techniques, familiarity with implementing watershed/wildlife/range/recreation projects, competency in inventory and monitoring methods, working knowledge of agency procedures, and comfort with GPS/GIS, data collection, data management, and public outreach. For questions, the announcement provided a BLM grants management contact (Eddie W. Bell Jr., Grants Management Officer, 602-417-9268, ebell@blm.gov).

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