25 Years of ZAP at the Oregon Zoo

On 12 October 2024, the Oregon Zoo in Portland, Ore., celebrated a special milestone: the 25th anniversary of the Zoo Apprenticeship Program (ZAP). More than 200 alumni gathered to celebrate a quarter century of this groundbreaking program, which was introduced in 1999 to help remedy a lack of diversity in both zoo careers and zoo audiences. How best do you do that? Employ members of marginalized communities in meaningful Zoo work.

Fast forward to 2020, the program involved taking animals into communities as a way of introducing young people to wildlife. Like everything else, that halted when COVID-19 intervened. As everyone hunkered down in isolation, the Zoo tried to keep the program going virtually through Zoom. 

“That did not work at all,” said Rafi Ali, a ZAP alum, and now employed as a Zoo naturalist. “Interns need to interact with people and animals face-to-face.”

But it turns out that, for the Oregon Zoo, there was a silver lining. 

“COVID was a real demarcation point for us. It showed us that the way to go forward was to bring communities into the Zoo,” said Melanie Sorensen, director of education and conservation at the Zoo.

 “The focus has always been to connect marginalized communities with nature and wildlife,” said Ariel Segura, coordinator of the Zoo Apprenticeship Program—and a ZAP alum. “And along with that, there is a workforce development component.” 

“What this means is that, along with learning about animals, nature, and the environment, the teenagers get a crash course in first-job skills,” said Danica Person, youth development supervisor at the Zoo. “They learn how to clock in on time, follow through on assignments, communicate with their peers, Zoo personnel, and members of their communities. They also gain leadership skills and learn how to work as a team.”

The Process 

The ZAP program begins with a rigorous application process that starts in October and ends in December. Applications go out to 15–17-year-olds in low-income communities and communities of color in the Portland Metro Area. Because the Zoo is a public institution, the job is listed on the governmentjobs.com website, which can be intimidating, especially for first-time job applicants. During the recruitment phase, ZAP staff help applicants navigate that process. Besides giving basic information—name, age, school, address—the applicants are asked to answer two open-ended essay questions. Questions like what excites you about being a ZAP? And can you share a time when you have had to be flexible? Whether or not the applicant gets to the interview stage depends on how he or she answers.

There is no requirement for applicants to have an interest in a career in zoos or conservation. What the supervisors are looking for is how the groups interact with each other. 

“We notice if they are kind to each other,” said Person. “Our goal is to inspire kids to be kind to one another and kind to the environment.” 

During the three-year ZAP cycle, staff regularly checks in with the interns, asking about their home life, their mental health, and their feelings about their work. 

“What I always tell them is that we care about the whole person,” said Person. “Not just the you that shows up at the Zoo.”

Some 80 to 100 applications are winnowed down to a series of group interviews, each with fifteen students. 

“One of the things we’re looking at is how they manage challenges as a team,” said Sorensen. 

An even smaller group is selected for individual interviews, and finally, ten teenagers are chosen for the three-year ZAP commitment. They are not volunteers; they are paid interns, and the time commitment is tailored to school schedules. During the school year, the interns are required to give 10-15 hours a month and attend one all-team meeting a month. In the summer, it is 20-25 hours a week. All told, they commit to five hundred hours per year. 

The Program

During the first year, ZAP participants learn about the Zoo, lead tours, and are introduced to conservation actions. In the second year, they continue to lead tours, sharing what they know with members of their communities and mentoring the incoming first-year cohort. Interns in their third year are given the opportunity to become program assistants. They learn more about the coordination of a tour, from problem-solving when lunch is late to delegating tasks. 

“They take the lead in organizing and leading the tours,” said Person. “They become the go-to person for that event.” 

Some of them even work behind the scenes alongside animal teams, like in the Oregon silver spot butterfly lab, or with North American species ranging from waterfowl to cougars.

“Our Zoo Apprentices are also trained as informal educators,” said Segura. “They learn how to communicate to different audiences. We may have preschool families on our tours, or culturally specific nonprofit camp classes, or Spanish-speaking elders from our community.”

The young people age out at 19, taking with them everything they have learned over the three years, including paying attention to what they can do to save the environment in their personal and professional lives. One intern realized his mother was doing the right thing by washing and reusing Ziploc bags. Another who went into the fashion business, decided to use only natural fibers to make the designs. 

The good news is that ZAP is replicable. 

“I would encourage other zoos and aquariums to look at what audiences they are not serving and find individuals from those communities to hire for their positions,” said Sorensen. 

The Payoff

ZAP succeeds on many levels. First, of course, is the opportunity for young people from underserved communities and low-income youth to be introduced to wildlife, the environment, and conservation. Then there is the influence these paid interns have on the Zoo, where they become part of the decision-making process on everything from budgets and campus planning to uniform designs. Finally, the most far-reaching effect is the influence ZAP interns have on their own communities. 

“If you invest in a teenager at 15 and give them a paying job, the community is bound to be affected by that teenager,” Sorensen said. “There is a powerful ripple effect.”

For Rafi, the years spent as a ZAP intern leading Zoo tours helped him with the job he has now. 

“The two years I spent giving tours, I learned a lot about the zoo and our animals. I was taking kids all over multiple times a week. I got lots of practice talking about our animals. And that is what I do now as a naturalist: talk about our animals,” said Ali. 

Not all ZAP alums found careers at a Zoo or another environmental sector. Many go into healthcare and education using the skills they learned during their ZAP years.

Changing Minds

The ZAP Program reaches out to youth from low-income and underserved populations who have not had access to zoos and who may have picked up a negative opinion of zoos. Rafi Ali worked for several months as a keeper. 

“It was really cool to get that insider experience,” said Ali. And he was also able to educate guests who had a dim view of zoos about the role of zoos as safekeeping animals and contributing to conservation efforts. “It felt really good to maybe not change their whole perception of zoos, but to change their minds a little bit.”

Sorensen agrees that changing the perception of zoos is a valuable benefit. “When you invite young people into a safe place where they can question us and challenge us on why we do things, they come out proud of all the amazing work zoos are doing.”

As part of the milestone celebration, the Oregon Zoo asked Inform Evaluation and Research to conduct a multi-faceted evaluation of ZAP’s first 25 years. “We wanted to see what worked well and what might work better in the future,” said Sorensen. 

Seventy alumni participated. Some of the comments: 

“It was the best first job I could ask for.” 

“The most important aspect of it all is that it gave me another path.” 

“I developed close relationships with peers from diverse backgrounds.” 

And many of the participants gave ZAP credit for improving their communication, teamwork, and leadership skills.

“My whole idea of conservation changed,” said Ali. “Before, I was turning off lights in my home to save money, but then I saw that it was a conservation action too. And other little thoughts popped into my head that I was able to share with other people. It is really cool.”

“This program changed my life,” said Segura. “There’s this whole career and passion I would not have envisioned for myself because I didn’t know it existed,” she said. “I feel really excited about the future I get to shape. And a lot of that is because of this program.”

Photos credit: © Michael Durham, Oregon Zoo.

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