Green Visions is a multi-pronged community-based program based on a vision for a more vibrant and flourishing Rochester. It is a youth workforce development program, a community revitalization effort and phytoremediation project based in the City of Rochester’s JOSANA neighborhood. Functioning as a neighborhood employer and work-site, Green Visions installs and cultivates flourishing gardens of flowers on once vacant city lots. The flowers from these lots, once in bloom, are harvested, arranged and then sold at various locations across the city by the program participants throughout the entire summer and early fall. Green Visions annually provides job training and work experience in the growing “green” industry, to 16 at-risk youth (ages 18-21), in order to increase participants’ chances for future employment and job growth. Another major goal of the program is to remediate and improve the quality of the soil on our lots, through implementation of sustainable gardening techniques and the addition of healthy, organic material to once stagnant, barren land. Our gardens fill vacant lots in the JOSANA neighborhood, and our program recruits and empowers young adults from that very neighborhood to be the agents of change in their community. The hands-on effort of the participants to improve their community has proven to be a remarkably powerful motivator. Green Visions participants understand that they are making their community a healthier and better place to live and develop great pride in their work. The program proactively combats urban blight, crime, youth unemployment, and poverty. In Green Visions’ pilot year of 2013, the program graduated and placed 85% of its enrollees into permanent employment or higher education. In the summer of 2014, Green Visions DOUBLED not only it’s capacity, by employing twice as many young adults, but the program also doubled the acreage of city land on which it worked. In 2015, Green Visions maintained program enrollment and was able to increase the available hours of weekly work and trainings to 20 hours per week over the duration of the 20-week program. Green Visions provides the region’s longest work development program to city youth, with a retention rate of 87%, Green Visions continues to develop and graduate teams of skilled workers prepared to enter the middle-skill professional field and re-enter academia.
