City Council Member Brad Lander (D) Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Gowanus) along with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) yesterday launched the “Gowanus Green Team,” a new green jobs training program for young adults in the Gowanus Canal Watershed.
Funded with $50,000 from the New York City Council’s “Greener NYC” initiative, the Gowanus Green Team program expands green job opportunities for residents of the Gowanus neighborhood, with a focus on recruiting young people from the Gowanus Houses, Wyckoff Gardens, and Warren Street Houses public
housing developments.
The six-week employment program for area youth provides participants with physical skills, including gardening, infrastructure maintenance, and tree pruning; social skills, including teamwork and communication; and knowledge about urban environmental issues facing Gowanus and other city neighborhoods.
“Together, we are making Gowanus a model for sustainability, resiliency, and environmental justice, following many decades of environmental abuse and neglect,” said Lander. “By employing young people
from our community, by giving them job-skills for the future, and by making Gowanus greener, we’re investing in what matters. Thanks to the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and the Lower East Side Ecology Center for leading the way toward a more sustainable and more equal future.”
The participants are now tending spaces throughout Gowanus including the Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s Nursery, street trees and bioswales throughout the Gowanus Watershed (including the 6th Street Green Corridor), in Washington Park (which houses the Old Stone House), as well as at Added Value’s Red Hook Community Farm and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Additional City Council funding will enable the Lower East Side Ecology Center to hire young people to establish a bicycle-based e-waste recycling program in Gowanus.
“Environmental and economic justice are not mutually exclusive,” said City Council Member Stephen Levin (D-Northern Brooklyn, Boerum Hill, Gowanus). ”Through innovative programming and intentional community engagement, it’s possible to prepare our youth for the jobs of tomorrow while we simultaneously invest in our resiliency. That’s what’s happening here. Through the Gowanus Green
Team, Council Member Lander and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities.”
Lander funded GCC to create a program that could be a model for local stewardship of the many green spaces in the neighborhood, including curbside bioswales, street trees, and neighborhood parks. Improving air and water quality emerged as a top priority during the Bridging Gowanus community planning process, as did the need for quality jobs in the emerging sectors of environmental remediation and open space stewardship. The Gowanus Green Team is an important part of the Bridging Gowanus vision for a sustainable, livable, and inclusive future for the Gowanus neighborhood.
GCC has created the program in close consultation with community partners and experts in job training program development. Partners have provided support in getting the program off the ground, helping with recruitment, and providing fieldwork opportunities for the apprentices. They include: the Fifth Avenue Committee, Trees New York (Young Urban Foresters Internship Program), Trellis, Green City Force, the High Line, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Added Value/Red Hook Community Farm.
The Green Team will care for neighborhood parks, including Washington Park, Thomas Greene Playground, and Ennis Playground. This summer, construction is beginning on a new playground at St. Mary’s Playground – location, details, etc. The Green Team program has been funded for Summer 2018, and will care for that space once completed.
“GCC and Council Member Lander has given these young teenagers a great opportunity to learn about the
environment and also a job opportunity,” said Monica Underwood, from the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice (GNCJ) and Wyckoff Gardens Resident Watch Leader. “They have learned about sewage clean-up, and also how to plant and what plants are good for the environment. I’m excited this program will be back again next year.”
