New Haven's Tree Planting Crews

URI’s GreenSkills program tackles two pressing needs in the New Haven community: declining citywide tree cover, and people with barriers to employment. Adults who have formerly been incarcerated face hurdles to employment and teens face challenges to gain their first job.

URI created GreenSkills to simultaneously solve these concerns establishing a program to train and employ New Haven youth and adults in planting street trees for New Haven residents, who adopt and care for the newly planted trees. Our GreenSkills team includes URI staff, plus 8 college interns, who will train 18 high school interns and 6 adult apprentices to plant 200 trees across New Haven this spring.

• On March 23 training begins for our crew of 6 adults from EMERGE, a local organization that supports people returning from prison to New Haven. We will plant trees with the adult crews Mon-Wed all spring. 
• On March 28, training begins for our youth teams from Common Ground H.S. and Sound School, who plant on Saturdays all spring.
• Together we will plant 200 trees in six weeks.
• Throughout the season the teams will learn tree planting techniques, tree identification and inventorying, and how to recruit people willing to adopt and care for a new tree, so that we can grow our network of tree advocates and plant more trees next fall. 

Our GreenSkills program aims to cultivate a sense of ownership and pride among our interns for their communities, their communities’ natural resources, and their own work capabilities. By offering green jobs, URI provides an important introduction to employment opportunities in the environmental field, and fight poverty at its source. 

We focus our tree outreach efforts in neighborhoods where there is lower tree canopy, with the goal of addressing the environmental injustices of unequal distribution of trees and the benefits that trees bring to our city.