Resilient Communities - Lower Roxbury

Green jobs training

A pilot cohort of 6 students gained valuable employment skills building shade and seating structures.

Lower Roxbury, Boston

Young people trained in green jobs to gain skills and build cooling structures.

Young people trained in green jobs gain valuable job skills.

Cooling stations provide shade and cooling relief to a local green space.

YouthBuild Boston’s green jobs curriculum is replicable across YouthBuild global’s network of over 160 programs.

To build a picture of each community, the Resilience for Communities (R4C) program used risk mapping, open-data sources, expert interviews, community surveys and focus groups. This assessment used the Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC) tool to assess community resilience to extreme heat and flooding - helping to identify priorities and design solutions.

Sources of resilience — Green jobs training for young people is strengthening Financial and Human capital in Lower Roxbury.

Financial

Human

Investing in young people’s career development improves their lifelong earning potential and their ability to support their families and communities.

Developing young people’s job skills strengthens their future employability and the skills they have available to support the community and family members.

Impact multipliers — Resilience solutions have a different mix of impact multipliers and impact multiple systems, businesses and societies. Together, multipliers produce an amplified impact.

Job creation for all

The green jobs curriculum supports career pathways for young people from communities with higher levels of unemployment and is easily replicable to other cities and communities.

How does this solution make a difference? – Addressing prioritized shocks and stresses

Unemployment

Extreme Heat

Cooling the community

Reducing urban heat exposure by equipping underserved youth with the skills to build climate-resilient infrastructure, including cooling stations with water-based solutions and shading structures.

Building skills for green jobs

Training and job pathways give young people practical skills for work in sustainability, maintenance and local resilience.

Roxbury and neighboring Dorchester have uneven access to parkland. Outside of Franklin Park, a large park in the southern part of the neighborhood, only 6% of the neighborhood is park space. Uneven park access means not all residents benefit from the cooling features of parks.

Source: Heat Resilience Solutions for Boston Final Report.

The YouthBuild team and student trainees at the cooling structure site in Dorchester.

Hot links

YouthBuild Boston

Lower Roxbury Community Action Plan