Green Team Builds Leadership and Environmental Stewardship Among Teens from Urban Neighborhoods

Green Team Youth Corps

GW Jax's Green Team Youth Corps Mission:

To educate, inspire, and provide skills to the new generation of environmentally engaged leaders of Jacksonville through a paid and service based programs focused on:

1. Connection between urban neighborhoods and the wild
2. STEAM Principle Learning
3. Leadership Development
4. Environmental Empathy

The Groundwork Jacksonville Green Team is a year-round program, broken into two programs/seasons: summer apprenticeship and school-year service-based fellowship.

The summer apprenticeship that offers stipend paid positions for high school students living in Jacksonville to help learn about and lead local environmental and healthy community initiatives, conduct research, raise awareness, challenge their peers to do community service, and participate in hands-on improvement projects throughout the City of Jacksonville. The program is intended to promote the protection and restoration of Jacksonville’s critical urban ecological systems, natural resources, and public health by engaging teens in advocacy and service-learning efforts focused on the community's parks, gardens, waterways, and vacant open spaces.

The Green Team program has dual goals - to prepare Jacksonville’s youth for a lifetime of environmental and healthy community leadership, and to invest in our community’s future and capacity to improve its physical environment.

Green Team Summer Apprenticeship 

Applications are open for our 2023 Summer Apprenticeship!

Small cohorts of 10 - 20 youth apprentices between the ages of 13-18 are recruited each spring. Youth apprentices who live in or access schools or places of worship within zipcodes 32202, 32204, 32206, 32208, 32209, 32254 are eligible to apply.

Youth selected to participate in the Green Team Summer Apprenticeship will identify project location, design, construct, install, and maintain projects such as Bee and Pollination Gardens, Urban Gardens, Bioswales, Rain Gardens, Food Distribution Systems, Environmentally-Infused Art, and much more! Active, healthy living, community service and close to home access to recreation are also key elements of the summer apprenticeship. Youth leaders play, learn, serve and work at and in connection with Jacksonville’s two National Park units (Fort Caroline National Memorial and Kingsley Plantation) to enhance access to the outdoors and provide increased outdoor recreation opportunities.

Each summer, one or more Green Team Summer Apprenticeship youth leaders are selected by Groundwork Staff to travel to Yellowstone National Park, all expenses paid by Groundwork USA. Groundwork Jacksonville Green Team youth, along with about 20 other Green Team youth from around the country learn new skills while conducting work projects to help restore and protect the natural, cultural, and historic resources of our national parks such as removing exotic or invasive plants, constructing or repairing boardwalks, bridges, trails, campsites, fences, and habitat preservation.

To learn more click here.

Green Team Community Service Fellowship 

Green Team Community Service Fellowship (volunteer hours, stipend for 2022-2023)

During the school year (fall-spring), teens between the ages of 13-18 and their families are invited to participate in the Green Team community service Fellowship. Community service Fellowship activities can include anything from monthly Hogans Creek litter cleanups to maintenance of planting projects along the Emerald Trail. The Fellowship gives youth the opportunity to help their community as well as earn community service hours and a small stipend, meet new friends, and gives youth a great chance of being selected to be a Green Team Apprentice if youth decide to apply.

To learn more click here.

 

Check our Events Page for upcoming Community Service Activities.