It Takes an Army
By Sam Settlemyre, CGC Conservation Program Manager
As the 2024 season winds down, we at the CGC are getting ready to launch a new training program for volunteers interested in restoring and protecting public greenspaces: Greenspace Guardians. Over the course of 11 months, through a mix of classroom time and on-site visits to local restoration projects, participants will learn the skills they need to take on leadership roles with conservation-focused local organizations.
The program is a culmination of our conservation efforts in recent years, all starting with our Treeforestation work at Walnut Woods of Evanston. Since the project started in 2018, we have worked with Cincinnati Parks and Walnut Hills High School to remove invasive plants, build a trail system, plant trees and engage lots of volunteers and students in the process. Thanks to the commitment of these partners, our work has resulted in an outdoor classroom for Walnut Hills students and a new greenspace for the neighborhood of Evanston.
All too often, projects like Walnut Woods burn out after a couple of years. Without proper maintenance, spaces are left to be overrun again by invasive plants and all the time and energy invested in the site is lost.
As the CGC’s Conservation Program Manager, my job is to help build community around greenspaces throughout the Greater Cincinnati region. There is always interest in installing a new pollinator garden or planting a few native trees, but the holdup comes with the maintenance. Who will come out and water the trees next summer or weed the garden in the coming years? As a team of just ten employees, the CGC doesn’t have the people power to maintain numerous community gardens or habitat restoration efforts—at least not by ourselves. That’s where we turn to partnerships and relationships with community members to sustain a project for years to come. As the demand for help managing public greenspaces grows, we’re turning our attention to training those community members to take on leadership roles.
In 2022, the CGC and Cincinnati Parks partnered to create the Cincinnati Conservation Stewards (CCS) Program. Building off of the model established at Walnut Woods, the program recruits and trains volunteers to restore and maintain forest restoration projects on Cincinnati Parks’ properties. With over 4,000 acres of forest and a conservation team of just two full-timers and a few seasonals, Parks staff relies heavily on volunteers to build the capacity needed to remove invasive plants, maintain trails and monitor forested parks. CCS trains volunteers to lead other volunteers in removing plants such as Amur honeysuckle that have taken over Cincinnati’s urban forests, negatively affecting both people and wildlife.
Through this partnership with Cincinnati Parks, we have learned what is takes to maintain habitat restoration projects into the future. Similar lessons have been learned from the last 40+ years of running our Community Gardens Program. In both cases, success relies on investment from the local community. When the community is invested in a greenspace, they are the ones who ensure that maintenance doesn’t go by the wayside. They help raise awareness about the space and the work happening there, which in turn attracts new people to get involved and keep the project going. Meanwhile, the CGC works to provide resources and training to ensure those community members have the tools they need to be successful. It’s a give-and-take that’s built around relationships and an awareness of the benefits, both tangible and intangible, that healthy greenspaces provide to a community.
As we look to the future of the CGC’s Conservation Program, I’m inspired by our work building the Cincinnati Conservation Stewards Program. Many conservation organizations in our region don’t have the funding or the capacity needed to take care of the forests and greenspaces they own. That’s why we are launching Greenspace Guardians. Our goal is to train the next generation of conservation volunteers and advocates to help restore and maintain public greenspaces in our area. After graduation, we’ll connect participants to local partners, such as Cardinal Land Conservancy and Mill Creek Alliance, who are in search of knowledgeable volunteers to help them with their conservation efforts. Through education and training, we hope to empower anyone interested to address some of the greatest environmental threats of our time by taking action at a local level.