The Greening of Detroit

The Greening of Detroit is a 501(c)(3) non-profit environmental organization whose mission is to inspire the sustainable growth of a healthy urban community through trees, green spaces, healthy living, education, training and job opportunities. The Greening serves communities in Detroit, Highland Park and Hamtramck, Michigan.

History


In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Detroit was known as the "City of Trees," boasting more trees per capita than any other industrial city in the world. Elms once dominated the boulevards, parks and neighborhoods, but after Dutch elm disease reached Detroit around 1950, the city began losing trees at an alarming rate. By 1980, more than half a million trees had died after succumbing to the disease or as the result of storms and urban expansion. During that same time period, economic constraints prohibited the City of Detroit from replacing the trees. With no routine maintenance to support it, Detroit's urban forest languished in a state of limbo for decades.

Devastated by the barren streets, Elizabeth Gordon Sachs, a champion of the city, mobilized residents, business owners and community leaders, and in 1989 they founded The Greening of Detroit as a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the city raise funds for trees. For its first project, The Greening of Detroit secured $100,000 in donations for a 1990 planting along the median of Larned from Interstate-375 to Mt. Elliott, east of downtown. 

As the city's economic situation deteriorated and the municipality's forestry department dwindled, The Greening's work expanded to include the planting of trees in addition to fundraising, beginning the longstanding community planting work for which it is well-known. Since the '90s, The Greening has worked in neighborhoods throughout Detroit, Highland Park and Hamtramck to identify areas in need of trees, determine which trees would be best suited for the site, and to marshal a corps of funders, residents and volunteers to get them planted. By the end of 2023, The Greening of Detroit’s decades-long efforts had resulted in over 146,000 trees planted with financial support from generous families, foundations and corporate partners, and with the help of tens of thousands of volunteers.

By the late 1990’s, The Greening of Detroit began developing new programs to complement its community tree planting endeavor. These included the TreeKeepers Kids, a habitat life sciences program for K-12 students in Detroit schools; Camp Greening, a summer day camp program for elementary school-age children; and the Green Corps, a summer youth employment program for teens ages 14–18. The organization became an active participant in the urban agriculture movement beginning in 2003, leading an array of programs such as the Garden Resource Program, an initiative that supported thousands of individual gardens throughout the city (now managed by Keep Growing Detroit); youth-based nutrition and gardening education at Romanowski Park in Detroit and at dozens of public-school gardens; and the Detroit Market Garden, a 2.5-acre urban farm adjacent to Eastern Market. In 2011, The Greening of Detroit assumed the management of Lafayette Greens, a half-acre demonstration garden located in the heart of the central business district. In 2010, with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, The Greening of Detroit launched its first adult workforce development program in partnership with Southwest Solutions to provide unemployed Detroiters with training for green sector jobs.

Current Programs
The organization works to coordinate and utilize vacant lots in Detroit for urban gardens and tree nurseries. Produce grown in the gardens is used to provide Detroit citizens with food, and trees grown in the converted vacant lots are replanted in the city. The conversion of the vacant lots also improves their appearance and serves to reduce vandalism.

The group is working to use bioremediation techniques to restore contaminated land in the city, including an abandoned lot owned by Detroit Public Schools.

Detroit Conservation Corp
The organization's Detroit Conservation Corp. (DCC) workforce development program was started in 2010, in partnership with LaSalle Bank. This job training program was developed "to provide unemployed Detroiters with valuable job training and certification in the green industry." This partnership has continued with Bank of America (which acquired LaSalle Bank in 2007), which provided a $200,000 grant for the Detroit Conservation Corp (Formerly GreenWorks) program in 2012. The Detroit Conservation Corp program provides training for jobs in landscaping, agriculture and forestry, and upon completion of the program, participants are afforded an opportunity to take the Landscape Industry Certification exam.

Green Corps
The Greening of Detroit employs 50 students in their Green Corps program every summer. The employees are picked from a pool of 2,000 prospects, and the jobs pay minimum wage. In the process of their work to maintain various plantings in Detroit, Green Corps employees also learn about urban ecology.

Controversy
According to a report by Christine E. Carmichael, a researcher from the University of Michigan, during Greening's tree planting in Detroit from 2011 to 2014, 24% of residents submitted a "no-tree request", more than 1,800 out of the 7,425 possible trees. Although they recognized the benefits of urban forestry, their personal experiences with the city government's initial deforestation of the area after the 1967 Detroit riot led to distrust. The city government's stated reason for deforesting the area was to control the spread of Dutch elm disease, including spraying DDT from helicopters over residential areas, but some African-American women interviewed by Carmichael viewed the deforestation and helicopters as increased surveillance of their communities in response to racial tensions, and consequently did not trust reforestation efforts. On the other hand, Greening representatives were under the impression that residents didn't recognize the importance of urban forestry. These differing perspectives on the city's history through different lived experiences was described by Carmichael as "heritage narratives".

Neighborhood residents also felt distrust towards Greening staff for not involving residents meaningfully enough in planning and decision making, as well as the fact that most of their volunteers were white and not from Detroit, a city with an African-American population of 83% in 2014. Additionally, residents felt that large trees already planted on city property weren't properly cared for by the city, causing issues with safety and the appearance of neighborhoods, and that they would also be made responsible for the trees that Greening planted without their input. Residents participating in the report were more willing to accept the trees if they got to choose what kinds of trees would be planted.

In 2014, some residents also protested against Greening's removal of playground structures and planting trees in southwest Detroit's Bridgeview Park. Greening's intent was to remove contaminants such as arsenic and lead with the new trees through phytoremediation, but residents voiced concerns such as that they didn't get to give input on the project, especially as a Black community; digging health hazards; and a possible rodent population increase. They were also not informed of the contaminated soil by the time the project started, although the Detroit Public Schools district, which held ownership of the land, had previously erected a fence to prevent trespassing.

In response to Carmichael's study, Greening expanded involvement of residents in planning and planting, as well as increased their number of community-engagement members from one person to four people, all of whom lived in Detroit.