Alejandro Elizarraraz stands in the middle of a grassy field with a saw in his hands. On a hillside overlooking the lush forests of northern California, the 18 year old cuts back brush and branches as a way to help prevent wildfires.

“We’re going to give the tree a high fade cuz it’s 10 feet,” he said, grinning. “You get it?”

Elizarraraz laughs at his joke and continues sawing. Wiping rain and sweat from his brow, he leans into the last branch, hears a crack, and lets out a whoop as it falls to the ground. His black Nike Air Force squelch through mud as he carries the pieces to a large pile, which will later be burned to eliminate fuel for future wildfires.

He grew up in the northern California city of Santa Rosa, nearly 60 miles north of San Francisco. While the surrounding region is best known as a destination for wine, redwoods and rugged coastline, the city also has high levels of gang activity.

The city has also been touted for its innovative youth violence prevention work. Now, it’s pioneering a new strategy: outdoor youth violence‑prevention programs that use the natural beauty of the region as a way to mitigate gun violence.

Working with the city, LandPaths, an environmental conservancy nonprofit, takes at-risk youth out of their concrete, urban environments and into the natural one, where they hike, camp and explore the natural wonders of Sonoma county, offering many of them their first encounters with the land. The change of scenery helps many students realize that there’s more to life than gangs and violence, organizers say.

Ocean Song/Meyers preserve, the coastal prairie and oak woodland where LandPaths hosts some of its programming, is only a 45‑minute drive from the neighborhood Elizarraraz grew up in. But the high schooler, who started in the program last year, says he had never spent time outdoors before he started working with the group.

“I never had a personal connection with nature,” he said. Most Saturdays he would stay inside and watch TV. Now, things are different.

Elizarraraz pulls back the hood of his poncho for a better view of the mist filled hills.

“Like, damn,” he said. “I feel amazed when I see all of this.”

Like many teens who come through LandPaths’s violence prevention program, Danny Chaparro grew up in Roseland, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Santa Rosa with a long history of gang violence. For more than a decade he has worked in youth violence prevention, showing young people that a kid from Roseland who looks like them can grow up to lead a prosperous life. He even has the letters R-O-S-E-L-A-N-D tattooed on his knuckles.

As LandPaths’s new audiences manager, he oversees programs that bring underserved communities out into nature.

Chaparro always knew he wanted to uplift the community he came from, but never imagined his job would be bringing at-risk youth into outdoor spaces he himself never explored. Like many of the young people he works with, he never had a strong connection to nature, growing up surrounded by concrete in Roseland.

“If you look around,” he said of Roseland, “everywhere that you see, there isn’t a mountain view in your sight.”

But since the violence prevention program was created early last year, he’s already seeing the effects of connecting teens with the natural world.

Chaparro, who previously worked at the Boys and Girls Club in Roseland, says that giving youth something to do and getting them into a different space helps them redirect their attention away from trouble. It’s even more effective to bring them into an expanse of endless green when all they’ve known is the concrete of their neighborhood, he says.

During his work at other organizations, Chaparro said many young people would walk into the building, sit down and stay put the whole time. But LandPaths, he says, brings out a different side of them. “I’ve seen some of those same youths now through my time at LandPaths show up to a preserve and start running and climbing a tree and just being a kid.”

These outdoor outings give many teens – who grew up too fast with the struggles of poverty or early gang initiation – a chance to play in the forest, a simple but profound privilege many never had in childhood.

Some of the students who came to LandPaths were so enthusiastic that after graduating from the program, Chaparro hired them for another initiative that teaches environmental stewardship skills.

One of them was Elizarraraz. The Young Stewards program is a part-time outdoor program that has teens work on trail building, habitat restoration and land-stewardship projects in Sonoma county.

Out of more than two-dozen Saturday sessions, Elizarraraz has never missed a day.

The consistency matters because Chaparro knows the struggles many young Latino kids are navigating outside these programs: the lack of a stable income, the influence of gangs, a parent who’s always working, easy access to guns. “You have more opportunities to be out in places that you shouldn’t be and past times that you should be in,” he said.

At a camp-out one night, Chaparro recalled a nighttime walk when the students were getting rowdy and messing around. So he set them to a challenge: two minutes, no talking, just staring up at the stars.

As the students settled in, staring up at the open sky, two minutes passed, then three, four, five. Chaparro stopped the timer and let the silence expand.

Later, in a reflection circle, he asked them why they let the time stretch longer than the challenge. Many told him that “they’ve never felt that much peace.”

In the late 1990s, the default response to gang violence was more law enforcement. By the early 2000s, cities across California began looking into the underlying factors – like trauma, poverty or lack of social activities – behind the violence.

That shift led to the creation of Santa Rosa’s Violence Prevention Partnership, a network of schools, nonprofits, city agencies and community groups that can refer youth into services, including environmental programs, like LandPaths.

Ernesto Olivares, a retired Santa Rosa police lieutenant and former mayor of Santa Rosa, said that to get a handle on gang violence, the entire Santa Rosa community needs to understand the cycles that perpetuate it.

“This kid didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m gonna go out there and start gang banging,” said Olivares. “There was an evolution to that.”

Early research shows that programs connecting students to environmental conservation work can reduce gang involvement among at-risk youth and help keep them on track to finish high school.

A pilot evaluation of a California Conservation Corps program for young adults found that its largely Latino participants self-reported significant decreases in antisocial behavior and gang involvement while taking part in paid environmental conservation work.

A main goal of environmental programs like LandPaths is to put tools in students’ hands before they reach for guns. This is especially important now, as ghost guns have been flooding the streets, says Santa Rosa police chief John Cregan.

Santa Rosa police seized 10 ghost guns in 2019. By 2024, that number had climbed to 124. In the first four months of 2026 alone, officers recovered 194 ghost guns. Cregan, who previously oversaw the police department’s Gang Crimes Team, says young people now have easier access to firearms than at any point in his 27-year law enforcement career.

Yajaira Hernandez, a high school student also in the Young Stewards program, sees this in her own life. “I feel like if someone says ‘I have a gun,’ it’s most likely they do,’” she said.

Chaparro says that even as access to guns keeps getting easier for young people, this small but budding prevention pipeline – rooted in the outdoors and northern California’s environmental identity – is starting to show real promise.

But he worries it may not get the chance to grow as the city of Santa Rosa faces a $17.5m budget deficit.

While advocates like Chaparro and Olivares celebrate the wins, they worry that as violence declines and graduation rates go up, Santa Rosa may become a victim of its own success.

“Unfortunately we are now considered too safe to get funding,” Olivares said.

There’s a predictable cycle, he said: violence rises, funders pay attention. Programs like Stand for the Land get resources, violence drops, funding pulls back, the cycle begins again.

But prevention should never stop, Olivares said.

Despite the funding uncertainty, employees who oversee these LandPaths programs say they’re adamant that they’ll find a way to continue combatting gang violence with access to fresh air.

The teenagers don’t think about budget cuts or donor dollars as they hike through the Ocean Song/Meyers Preserve after lunch. They laugh, slipping and sliding through the muddy trails, stopping along the way to chat about the best leaves for toilet paper in a pinch and the anatomy of the banana slug.

As the cars come back into sight, an old tire swing appears on the right. “Does anyone want to take a swing?” one of the staff members asks. The teens glance at each other. An awkward silence settles among the trees.

Elizarraraz grins and steps up, “Yeah. I’ll do it,” he said. “Can you give me a push?”

• This story was produced in partnership with the California Local News Fellowship. A version of this story will appear on Northern California Public Media