Solar Youth Trailblazers on the trail.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, as Robert Frost once wrote — but they are sometimes also knee-deep in trash and in need of a major clean-up, new trails, bridges, and sustained TLC.
That describes the woods between the Westville Manor and Rockview public housing developments in West Rock and the new life the area is receiving thanks to a program appropriately called Trailblazers run by Solar Youth.
The environmental youth organization successfully piloted the program last year; click here to read an article about its efforts to revitalize those underutilized woods and connect them to the West Rock Nature Center.
Solar Youth now hopes to make the program permanent, on a stronger financial footing.
On Wednesday night representatives attended the monthly meeting of the Westville/West Hills Community Management Team meeting to describe the program and explain that the group is applying for $30,000 from the city’s share this year of the federal CDBG (Community Development Block Grants)..
The Zoom-assisted meeting attracted two dozen neighbors and was chaired by Amy Marx.
Solar Youth representative Julia Lister asked the management team for a formal letter of support to accompany the group’s request to the city for the $30,000. The program was piloted in the fall through employing 15 16 – 24-year-olds, with funding from Youth at Work, among other sources.
“We’re asking for funding for staff to lead Trailblazers,” Lister explained. The work the young people would continue to do into this year includes “removing litter, clearing downed trees, designing and creating trails.”
Future plans include “enhancing the experience of recreation with some bridges, lean-tos, and maybe some rope course,” she added.
Kathleen Brady, who leads one of the area block watches, said she has worked in the past with Solar Youth kids, and found the experience worthwhile.
The voice vote taken at the end of the meeting was unanimous in favor of the Solar Youth request. The next step is for the CMT’s executive committee to draft the letter and send it on to the city as part of Solar Youth’s application.
Thank you to Solar Youth for giving West Rock Park some much needed love and giving young people jobs cleaning up their community. I would love to hear about more neighborhoods having Solar Youth chapters in their communities to help clean up, repair and take care of the parks, playgrounds, green spaces and the natural habitats in their area.