Collazo, 17, is a city kid with a woodman’s job. The T.C. Williams High School student is spending his summer with the Student Conservation Association, working with a crew of teens to build trails, plant trees and restore natural habitats. Collazo and his co-workers took a break from the outdoors last week and traveled to Capitol Hill to applaud the Public Lands Service Corps Act of 2009, helping to fund programs like his.

What do you do every day? I have to be at the Rosslyn Metro at 7:45 each morning, then we drive from there to our site for the day, usually in Northern Virginia. We rebuild trails, we weed around the trees, we mulch, anything the park needs done. We use a lot of different tools, we plant things — there’s a lot of stuff that we do.