Training Tomorrow's Resilience Workforce
Proud grads, Justin and Thomas
Snapshot: The key to our resilience goals is a trained resilience workforce, the folks who design, install, and maintain the “green infrastructure” we want to use. But this work takes special training and there is a shortage of new workers in these professions. Wetlands Watch, The Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professionals, and the Elizabeth River Project teamed up in a special pilot program to recruit and train apprentice landscapers.
Backstory: Wetlands Watch and its partners with the Chesapeake Bay Landscape Professional (CBLP) program have developed a training and certification program in green infrastructure practices needed to manage stormwater and help control flooding. “Green infrastructure” is being promoted as the preferred approach to managing water on the landscape but there are many barriers to its full use - the major one being the need for a trained workforce. And this training goes beyond landscape professionals to envision a green infrastructure workforce development - which requires cross training of a landscape workforce with engineering, environmental science, planning and several other professions to get these green infrastructure practices right.
The CBLP program has an entry-level training program - the CBLP Associate certificate - designed to bring young talent into the landscape profession. Wanting to try it out in Virginia, Wetlands Watch and CBLP partnered with the Elizabeth River Project in a pilot program, funded by our workforce development grant from RISE. The two young men in the picture are the first graduates of this program. We hope to train many more.
Wetlands Watch began looking into the barriers to the use of green infrastructure almost a decade ago, and was contracted to study the issue. We then dug deeper and held a two-day statewide collaborative summit in Virginia to find out what we needed to do to install more green infrastructure practices on private property. The main finding from the Summit? We needed a trained green infrastructure workforce to design, install, and maintain these green infrastructure practices. In our early work we found the most critical piece was maintenance, as we documented tens of thousands of dollars worth of practices destroyed by untrained maintenance crews. The CBLP-A program will help fill the need for entry-level trained landscapers, allowing them to develop and advance and…maybe someday own their own landscape businesses!