A fourth-generation Nevadan who believes that a connection to nature is critical for one's health.

Joe Kennedy, Executive Director of Get Outdoors Nevada, is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Born and raised in Las Vegas and into a family with deep local roots, he wanted to branch out and did so when moving to Los Angeles after high school.

In Hollywood, he'd lead high profile projects in film production and event planning but still felt that something was missing, and that something ended up being nature.

Now the executive director of the nonprofit Get Outdoors Nevada, Joe Kennedy, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Joe Kennedy) Amber, thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

-Fourth-generation Nevadan, what originally brought your family to Nevada?

-Yeah, so quite a few different things.

So I'm the third generation born and raised and the fourth to call it home.

That fourth generation who first moved here, on both sides of my family, came for opportunity, and they found it.

So on one side of my family, my great-grandfather moved out here after graduating from school as an engineer, and he moved out with the Army Corps of Engineers in 1941.

At the time, they were just getting ready to build-- the US was entering World War II, and they were building Nellis Air Force Base.

And he played a role in getting the Air Force gunnery range built.

And then he saw the opportunity here.

He was one of the first 10,000 folks living here in the Las Vegas Valley.

-Wow.

-At that time, I think his number of like, when he registered in the state of Nevada as engineer, he was like Number 306 or something like that.

So, yeah, he ended up staying here.

That was my great-grandfather, J.A.

Tiberti, and started a construction company and a fence company and was very involved in the development of Las Vegas and cared about this community so much and found great opportunity here.

As well, so my grandfather, my great-grandfather Kennedy, he had been living in the Midwest.

He was a police officer by day and then working in the evening as to support a mail clerk room.

He was building a house in Kansas, in Lawrence, Kansas.

While he was building the house, he cut off his thumb and his pointer finger, and he could no longer use a gun, and so he lost his job as a police officer.

So he was looking for opportunity.

He ended up finding, through a cousin, someone who came here.

He moved here to Las Vegas, and he became a dealer and then became a pit boss at Caesars Palace when Caesars Palace opened in the 1960s, early 1960s.

So he was there from the very beginning of Caesars Palace.

And then on my mom's side of the family, I had my great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents, those two generations together, they bought a motel that was called the Monie Marie Motel.

It was located about where the MGM Grand is today.

And they had the opportunity to move here from Southern California, buy that motel.

It was a full family business.

They all pitched in to run it together.

My grandma tells stories about coming home after school to help clean up some of the rooms and learning to swim at the Glass Pool Inn, which was next door to them, and, you know, kind of pitched in.

And that was, again, another "seeing that opportunity" and seeing the opportunity that our great city has.

So, you know, my family story is that story of so many people from Vegas, where they see opportunity here, they see opportunity to do different things, build a new life here, and that's what brings them to the city.

-And your grandfather Renaldo Tiberti he passed away in September, correct?

-Yes, he sure did.

Yeah.

-His legacy in Las Vegas, what is it?

-Oh, my gosh.

So, yeah, he was the next generation after my grandfather J.A.

He was a real estate developer, really big in doing raw land deals and, you know, real estate development across the community.

He also kind of started a business called Putter's Bar and Grill.

There's one across the street from our studio here today.

I actually got my-- the very first job I ever had in high school, one summer as a high school student, I was a busser at Putter's Bar and Grill.

My grandpa was one to make sure that I was, you know, pitching in for the family business.

We've all, all of our businesses have always been family business, and so they wanted to make sure I had that good, strong work ethic, and was grateful for that.

But so, yeah, he was a real estate developer here in town that, again, really was, you know, instrumental in shaping the growth of the community, growth of the city.

He-- -And also an outdoorsman?

-An avid outdoorsman, yeah.

-Is that how you became involved with nature?

-When I was growing up, we did-- I mean, I've got great pictures of, you know, myself strapped on my dad's back when I was no more than, you know, a toddler, even, you know, probably less than a year old, out there hiking in Red Rock.

And that's something that continued throughout the rest of my life.

So my great-grandfather J.A.

built a cabin in the 1950s that the family loves, and we would recreate there all the time.

And so that was instilled from my grandfather Renaldo, and he was always an outdoorsman.

He was a hunter, a fisher.

He was a hiker.

He was a boater.

He did all of these things.

In the last couple years of his life, one of my best memories with him is going out and crabbing with him in the Pacific Northwest and him teaching me how to clean and, you know, and cut down a crab that we had just caught.

It was so much fun.

-Oh, how neat.

-Yeah, so much fun.

And so, you know, that was something that we did every summer.

We were going to the cabin, fishing.

We were outdoors.

And that was just something that I just kind of always enjoyed and was a big part of my childhood, and it wasn't until later that I kind of looked back and said, wow, those were really incredible opportunities I was so lucky to have.

And you know, not many folks get all those opportunities to be outdoors.

If your family isn't recreating in that way, or, you know, you don't realize what amazing outdoor recreational opportunities are around, you might not get those opportunities as a kid.

And then there can be that barrier of you feeling like, oh, I don't know how to fish or how to hike safely or how to do some of these outdoor activities.

And so you kind of don't pursue them as an adult.

-Well, and then that is your line of work currently.

-Yeah.

-A big part of your mission is to introduce especially families and at-risk children to nature who may not get that opportunity.

-Absolutely.

-What can happen if an at-risk child, for example, is exposed to nature?

How powerful can that be?

-Yeah.

It's such an important thing and not even just for at-risk children, for all children right now.

What we're really seeing is kind of an epidemic of what I would almost call nature deficit disorder it's been called a little bit, where our kids are just, they're not spending time outdoors in the way that, you know, we may have when we were growing up.

There's so many different things that that causes.

There's, you know, increases to anxiety, increases to depression, increases to ADD or ADHD.

All of these things are really exacerbated by a lack of time outdoors.

The outdoors, it's part of how we're designed and evolved to be.

We are connected to our natural world, and, as humans, we need to have that connection to nature.

When we have it, our lives are wholer and we are happier as individuals.

There's a million studies I could quote, you know, kind of back up some different pieces of that, but it's really just, you know, it's imperative that we spend time, and especially young people, develop that connection with the outdoors, so they have those skills, those confidence to enjoy the outdoors, that comfortability with the outdoors.

You know, building those as a child, it's really important to do that, and it changes the whole way you see the world.

When you can make those connections between things that you hear about or read about, whether it's, you know, the desert or our wildlife around here, there's a really big difference between, you know, hearing and reading about a desert tortoise or a coyote or seeing one in person.

-Yeah, you call that place-based learning?

-Yeah, place-based learning, exactly.

It's one of those things that's so incredible.

I think we have a unique opportunity to do that here in Vegas, because Nevada, as you, as you may know, it's the state with the most government-- federally owned land and the managed land in the lower 48.

And then on top of that, right here in Clark County, we have managed land managers from all the federal agencies.

U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, they're all managing these wonderful sites right around us, from Lake Mead to Sloan Canyon to Red Rock Canyon.

There's really amazing places that are like sometimes only 15 to 20 minutes drive away, and you can be in a whole different world.

It's really incredible.

-Maria Silva, host of Student Spotlight here on Vegas PBS, she accompanied you on a field trip recently.

That was to?

-That was to-- we went to Boulder City.

So we were taking some students.

They were fourth grade students from MaCaw Elementary School, and they were learning about Nevada state history in the fourth grade.

So to support that learning, this is where that "place-based" comes in.

We took them to the Nevada State Railroad Museum and to see Lake Mead and, of course, Boulder Dam in the home of Boulder Dam.

So these are things that are part of that curriculum in their textbook, but, especially for young learners in fourth grade, it's really hard to contextualize.

You know, our world looks very different than it did in the 1930s and 40s when these things were happening.

And so it's hard for these young learners to contextualize what a railroad of that time might look like or what a Boulder Dam construction site might look like.

But coming and actually bringing them to these places, then suddenly you get to see those wheels turning in their head and the connections being made, and they're like, Oh, my gosh, this is what we read about, and this is, what was going on here.

-You told me you experienced that yourself as a child with Yucca Mountain, going on a field trip there after hearing so much about it as a potential nuclear waste site.

-Oh, my gosh, yeah.

-I'm just summarizing that, because we have so much more to fit in.

Why did you want to leave Nevada then when you were a teenager, as I mentioned?

-Yeah, absolutely.

Much like my grandfather Renaldo, I was an adventurer at heart.

And as much as I loved Vegas, at the time I felt like, Oh, I'm ready to get out and spread my wings and go, you know, into something else.

And so at that time, I had been a big theater student in high school, and so I was always drawn to the entertainment industry, to Hollywood.

I was fortunate enough to go to USC and study film and theater there.

And that was kind of, you know, my focus.

So I was fortunate to get into the industry, and that was kind of where I got my start in the career.

-And it was via someone here in Las Vegas who hooked you up for your first film?

-Actually, my connection to Las Vegas really helped me get my foot in the door in the industry.

I was just about to finish my senior year of college, and, again, as a film studies, theater studies major, you kind of don't know what exactly is going to be in store, what that looks like.

And so I was getting ready to graduate.

It was about three weeks away from graduation, not sure what I was going to do.

One of my professors was, who's today, actually, the president of the Costume Designers Guild of America.

She reached out to me and she said, Hey, I've got a colleague, a friend of mine, who's getting ready to film a movie in Vegas.

And you're from Vegas, and so, you know, maybe you would be a good fit for their team.

So she set us up for a phone call interview, and I got the job and was hired onto my first movie about a week before graduating, thankfully.

I came to Vegas to work on that movie.

It was Think Like a Man Too with Kevin Hart, and it was such a wonderful production.

We filmed at Caesars Palace, which felt very full circle to me, given my great-grandfather had been a pit boss there back in the day.

So, yeah, I really enjoyed working on that film.

And then the same costume designer designed The Mindy Project, which I came back to LA to work on the next five seasons of that show, which we were nominated for an Emmy for the costume set program.

He's a brilliant designer, Salvador Perez, a real mentor to me.

So that was how I started.

But, you know, Vegas also then became a thing.

And, even in my film career, there was another movie I worked on called The Trust, where I came back to Vegas to be a costumer for Nicholas Cage, a local resident and who loves Vegas, and Elijah Wood.

And, again, it was just people, you know, I was on break for the summer, summer hiatus from the mini project and I had a couple weeks, and someone's like, Hey, aren't you from Vegas?

Do you want to work this movie in Vegas?

It sticks in your mind when people remember that you're from Vegas, because it's such a unique place to be from.

-And now there's a push to have Vegas be "Hollywood 2.0," as Mark Wahlberg likes to say.

I want to get back to Get Outdoors Nevada.

We only have one minute left.

It's volunteer month, National Volunteer Month in April.

How does that fit into what you're doing?

-Yeah.

So we have three pillars of connection.

So environmental education, which I talked about through the students, and then awareness, which is what we're doing here, telling people about the great things they can do outdoors.

The last is the volunteerism, is getting people connected to giving back to our land here in Southern Nevada.

So we do volunteer programs all year long, basically from September through to May.

We're doing something every weekend.

Last year, we engaged 3,000 volunteers, and we collected over 20,000 pounds of trash, most of that micro plastics, and, again, getting that out of the environment, make sure it doesn't end up in our very limited water supply, and it doesn't end up harming wildlife like our desert tortoises and our birds, which often eat micro plastics and then can die.

So it's really important to get that.

We have events going on all year long.

People can visit getoutdoorsnevada.org to sign up for those events and see what's going on.

And just come, come check it out, meet other people who are really engaged in the community and learn about a new park and pitch in and just spend a couple hours with us.

-Joe Kennedy, with Get Outdoors Nevada, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you, Amber.

It's been a pleasure to be here.