JOBS

* Parks and Open Space Promote New Jobs* Parks and recreation programs offer opportunities for job training for relatively unskilled workers and youths.

Knack, Ruth Eckdish. July 1994. "Dig These Gardens." Planning.

Urban gardens create new employment opportunities in landscaping and gardening work. The Trust for Public Land nurtures new groups like the East Bay Urban Gardeners in Oakland, California.

"A leader in such efforts is SLUG-- the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners. Its director, Mohammen Nuru, is a Nigerian landscape architect with a background in planning who has been with the group since 1991. 'When I started SLUG was a gardening group, with only three people on the staff'' says Nuru. A year ago, he started focusing on job training, particularly for young adults. ...Today, there are 10 full-time staffers and an annual budget of $1.4 million, most from community development block grant and other city funds."

Thompson, William. July 1996. "From Blight to Bounty." Landscape Architecture.

"Until May of 1995 the four acre site which spans the grounds of the Alemany housing project and St. Mary's Park was used primarily by contractors for dumping spoil dirt and waste concrete. Old refrigerators, wrecked cars, and household garbage found their way to the site as well. But that began to change when teenage garden interns for the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), in collaboration with the Alemany residents' council and other groups, filled several sixteen-foot-long dumpsters with debris, cleared away exotic vegetation, and broke ground for the St. Mary's Urban Youth Farm."

"For some of the interns this project represents their first legitimate employment; for most of them, it is their first experience in making a contribution that connects them to their communities. They earn from minimum wage to $5.50 an hour for working twenty hours a week during the summer and ten hours a week during the school year"

"St. Mary's Youth Farm is only one of several SLUG programs aimed at improving conditions for San Francisco youth, low-income adults, and community gardeners. In fact, SLUG crews create gardens and green spaces throughout San Francisco while employing and training teens and young adults in landscape construction and carpentry."

"planting must be scheduled so that some food can be harvested toward the end of each month, when public-assistance money is running out for many residents. Vegetables from row crops are distributed to soup kitchens in other low-income communities The garden interns are also being schooled in entrepreneurial skills. They are in the initial stages of marketing a line of such food products as Urban Herbals, a salad vinegar that uses garlic and rosemary grown on the farm. SLUG has also begun to market soil amendments and mulch produced on the farm's composting operation."

"Finally, Seattle is setting a precedent by passing an open-space ordinance requiring that land be set aside permanently for community gardens is that they are not, as in most cities, temporary land uses."

Curriden, Mark. June 8, 1994. "Cleaning up pollution, creating jobs: Chattanooga aiming for new urban image: 'Environmental City.'" The Atlanta Journal/ The Atlanta Constitution.

"In 1970, the federal government declared this city the nation's most polluted. ....But much has changed in two decades. The air and water are cleaner. And city leaders say they recruit only businesses meeting tough environmental standards. 'We are turning our city into a living laboratory,' said City Council member, David Crockett, a leader of the city's environmental movement. 'We are taking a city that has done so much damage to our environment in the name of economic growth and using our interest in cleaning up our environment to expand the local economy. This time, though, the jobs we're creating will last.'"

Andrew, Mark. August 22, 1994. Hennepin Community Works: An Employment, Public Works, and Tax Base Development Program. Hennepin County, Minnesota.

The premise of the program is to "train and employ chronically underemployed and unemployed persons in large scale public works projects that create linkages between neighborhoods, local units of government, the public and private sectors, and infrastructure and the environment. Projects that have the potential to accomplish this linkage include the construction of parks, hiking and biking trails, green space, the restoration of environmental systems, and the preservation of habitat. In the process, jobs will be created, economic development will be spurred, property values near newly created 'green' amenities will increase and a spirit of community will replace the decay and dislocation that isolates far too many citizens."

The Hennepin Community Works program provides the "framework to ensure that the immediate work opportunities resulting from public infrastructure investments benefit the construction industry and provide work and job skill training opportunities for the economically disadvantaged."

Littman, Margaret. May/June 1996. "Green City." The Neighborhood Works, v.19, no. 3.

"Job training and job creation possibilities are as varied as the urban greening programs themselves. In Chicago, job training includes asking academics to talk to neighborhood children at community gardens about careers in horticulture, says Glenda Daniel, urban greening director at the Openlands Project, a Chicago-based open space protection group. This June, for example, Openlands is holding a workshop on job opportunities in greening, from landscaping to retail sales."

"Job creation can also come though city agencies, as workers for plant maintenance, trash clean-up, and graffiti removal at the new parks and greenways are needed. This is particularly important, Daniel says, in low- and moderate-income communities, where well-paying government jobs with benefits can help turn around a neighborhood economy.

"New jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities follow recreational spaces, such as Baltimore's renovated harbor, where businesses offer products and services such as in-line skate rental and food. On the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, entrepreneurs lead river rafting tours and have opened shops providing river gear; canoeing has had the same effect on the Chicago River."

Cook, D. Ernest and William P. Ryan. December 1993. "Promoting eco-tourism." insert in Community Open Space: New Techniques for Acquisition and Financing. International City/County Management Association.

"With a land base dominated by wetlands and fewer than 4,000 residents scattered over 240,000 acres, Tyrrell County, North Carolina, ranks lowest among North Carolina's counties in per capita income and is limited in traditional development opportunities. After the county took a hard look at its situation in 1988, however, it developed a unique strategic plan that focuses on developing an environmentally based tourist industry. Officials in Tyrrell County are aggressively pursuing a sustainable development strategy that showcases the county's abundant natural resources while creating employment opportunities for local residents.

Working with The Conservation Fund, a national organization, town and county officials engineered the transfer of 110,000 acres of privately-owned wetlands to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now officials are lobbying for federal funds to build a National Wildlife Refuge Visitor and Environmental Education Center in the Town of Columbia. The Scuppernong River Greenway will link the town to the wetlands and waterways of the wildlife refuge. A vast network of interpretive trails, boardwalks, and canoe and bicycle trails will attract 'eco-tourists' and generate small business opportunities. A private, non-profit community development corporation has been established to provide job skills and small business development training for local residents, and the Tyrrell County Youth Conservation Corps will teach job skills and furnish training to disadvantaged young adults and involve them in literally rebuilding their community."

Page last updated 04/03/2000