Beyond the Five-Year Grant

Words by Sophie Vaughan

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the City of Akron’s ACORN Project, a $1 million Urban Forestry and Workforce Development program funded by a grant from the USDA Forest Service. In Part 2, we detailed the next steps that the ACORN project’s partners need to take to get the program started, as well the cuts that had to be made to the original $6.7 million grant proposal to fit the budget for the $1 million award. This final part of the series addresses the future of the program beyond the five-year grant.

City of Akron Watershed Superintendent Jessica Glowczewski — who developed this project with Akron Zoo and Truly Reaching You (TRY) Ministries — hopes that if this program is successful, it could continue with subsequent rounds of grant funding, or that the City could adopt the program in some fashion.

“I’m hoping that…over the course of the five years of this program, that we can really build some good relationships with our partners and build some relationships with the communities so that it becomes a cheaper endeavor,” she says. “We’ll see what happens…we’re going to continue to try and find some money.”

Glowczewski says there is a possibility of some additional funding from another grant opportunity for which City of Akron Park Superintendent John Malish applied that could possibly be used to give the program a little more flexibility or potentially even extend the program for another year. She also sees an opportunity for sponsorship through local businesses like nurseries or tree services who need skilled laborers.

The City of Akron is already showing a commitment to supporting this project in certain ways. Aside from funding the preparation and initial infrastructure at the Theiss Woods property, the City’s Human Resources department has offered to provide a series of soft skill trainings to Forestry Academy participants, which will be provided by the City at no cost to the program.

“I want these people to be leaving this academy as prepared as we could possibly get them in eight weeks,” Glowczewski says.

While the program will continue beyond the current mayoral term, Glowczewski says it is critical to find a way for the program to self-fund in the future. She would like to see legislation from City Council in support of the program, to continue to build support until Project ACORN becomes just another City program.

Getting it Right with Community Engagement

Glowczewski says that this is a social justice project. “We are trying to build our own, and that is something that I think everybody here is committed to and very interested in: how do we get Akron residents to work in the communities they live in? How do we get Akron residents to be involved in the government?” 

To this end, Glowczewski believes the community engagement portion of the project is incredibly important.

“We want to make sure that the people coming in and speaking in these communities resonate with the people who live in these communities,” she says.

Glowczewski recalls hearing a story from Collins about a tree planting project in Detroit, Michigan that failed miserably because the people doing the planting did not talk to the people who actually lived in the community before planting the trees.

She was likely referring to the 2014 tree-planting project by a local Detroit environmental nonprofit called The Greening of Detroit (TGD). TGD partnered with the City of Detroit to increase tree-planting to 1,000 to 5,000 new trees per year, which would require more participation from residents — homeowners would need to be willing to allow the planting of these new trees. However, of the 7,500 residents TGD approached, about one quarter of them declined to have trees planted in front of their homes. Interviews with residents and staff members revealed that the rejections were largely due to distrust of the city and a lack of connection with the tree planters and TGD, which had only one community-outreach person on staff. That outreach person did not involve neighborhood residents in the planning of the reforestry program.

“They meant well, but they didn’t know the history,” Glowczewski says. “They didn’t have a backstory and they didn’t reach out to these people, and that is definitely not something that I want this program to run into.”

She explains the need to have someone come in who is not from the City: “I think that’s also important. It’s not the city coming in telling you what they want.”

Instead, community engagement partners come in and listen, engage, and are interested in knowing what the residents want for their neighborhoods. Rather than environmentalists coming into a neighborhood and thinking they know what’s best for the area because they know about trees, a community engagement partner will come in and ask what the residents feel about a tree program, what they want, what they do not like.

“So that is an important thing to keep in the budget,” Glowczewski says.

Still, some facets of the community engagement portion of the program had to be cut from the original grant proposal. While the project will still target the five neighborhoods written into the original grant, the program will not be able to invest as much green infrastructure in each of those areas as planned. This means that the community engagement piece is even more critical, as information obtained from engagement activities will inform where the green infrastructure projects will be focused. With the bigger budget, anyone who wanted trees in those target areas could have had trees. Since the budget has been cut, the funds to purchase and plant the trees are not as abundant, and planting will have to be a lot more selective and will lean heavily on community input about tree planting location preferences.

Glowczewski hopes that eventually, if the City of Akron were to adopt Project ACORN, that they would have made enough strides within local communities that the residents would feel comfortable talking to City representatives directly.

“That’s going to be one of those things that we have to evaluate throughout the course of the grant,” she says.

While the long-term impacts and future of the program remain unknown, Project ACORN has the potential to obtain ongoing support from the City of Akron and other private funding partners, even beyond the five-year scope of the USDA grant. Such support is needed to protect this valuable green space from further development, which would mark a win for local environmentalists and friends of the Merriman Valley.

Read Part 2 Next Steps for Theiss Woods and ACORN Partners here