Youth Green Team
FGRP plants 750 to 1,000 trees each year with volunteers in the City of Grand Rapids to help reach the city's tree canopy goal of 40% by 2025.
In order to care for the trees after their planting, and ensure their longevity, FGRP has created the Youth Tree Stewards program. This program will employ Grand Rapids area youth ages 16-20 to care for the trees each summer.
Friends of Grand Rapids Parks will work with community partners based on neighborhoods to identify youth living in the neighborhoods close to where the trees have been planted. FGRP will be promoting a place-based mentality, fostering civic pride, and encouraging youth to take ownership of green space. The opportunity builds job skills, offers paid summer work for youth, and engages young people as change agents, empowering them to actively improve their environment.
Friends of Grand Rapids Parks is hiring a community-based cohort (3-5 per year) of 16-20-year-old Tree Stewards to maintain planted trees in the Grand Rapids area.
Youth Green Team
This program is designed to provide youth jobs in their own neighborhood, to build critical job skills, and a sense of entrepreneurship. The project offers young people a model for environmental stewardship, exposure to environmentally-focused career pathways, and cultivating skills and dispositions needed to act as ecologically-minded community leaders.
Partners with a shared mission!
The Youth Green Team brings together partners like the Urban League, Hispanic Center of West Michigan, and Other Way Ministries to give our teams the best experience. Here is how we work:
Urban League, Hispanic Center, Other Way Ministries
- Recruit youth ages 16-20 interested in a summer job outdoors that live within walking or biking distance to local parks
- Supplement with providing job training skills
Friends of Grand Rapids Parks
- Provide all equipment for watering team
- Provide bicycle for each team member needing transportation
- Provide shirts for each team member
- Provide PPE
- Provide onsite management and oversight in the field for watering
- Provide career exploration workshops in Forestry and other Green Jobs