Trenton Needs to Build a Green Workforce that will Cultivate a Liveable City

When New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin visited my school, he asked students what we thought of Trenton. One student declared that he plans to escape to somewhere better. I, however, believe that real, deep change is possible in Trenton, and I believe that change begins with cultivating Trenton into a liveable city. Trenton Health

The thought of escaping Trenton does provide momentary relief to what may otherwise feel like bleak conditions. However, the reality is that Trenton’s circumstances are a product of – not separate from – prevailing systemic issues. For example, Trenton is suffering from what is the broader silent mental health epidemic afflicting New Jersey: roughly 1-in-4 people suffer from poor mental health in NJ. Across Mercer County alone, anxiety and depressive disorders account for 40 out of 100,000 mental and behavioral disorder deaths among white community members and 34 out of 100,000 among black community members. These challenges become exacerbated in low-income communities including Trenton while remaining overlooked because most people aren’t focusing on their mental health, instead, they’re toiling away just to put food on the table and keep their families healthy. 

And all this work is uphill since Trenton is both a food and medical desert. This means that we lack adequate access to both clean food and healthcare services that are at the heart of a healthy community. Still, much of Trenton remains underutilized in our effort to improve the outlook of community health: vacant land and parking lots are as prevalent across the City of Trenton as open, green spaces.

Expanding the extent of green spaces across the city will have significant benefits to Trentonians’ mental and physical health.  Green spaces contribute to cooler and cleaner air by creating shaded areas with reduced pollution. Green spaces, including parks, give community members spaces to go outside and be active – whether you’re riding a bike or going for a walk, running or participating in a community sport event, or gardening or bird watching, which improves our cardiovascular health, our immune systems, and reduces stress. Finally, green spaces can increase the abundance of pollinators, like birds and bees, that make our backyard and community gardens more successful in producing fruit and vegetables for everyone to eat. 

Healthy fruits and vegetables that are rich in calcium are especially vital to Trenton because they increase our bodies’ ability to reduce the concentrations of lead, which is abundant in our water, soils, and the paint in our homes. To be sure, expanding the extent of green spaces and their benefits across the city will not solve our economic issues. Indeed, without adequate cash flow, Trenton will fail to maintain even a satisfactory quality of life for its community members. The next generation of Trentonians will need a livable city powered and stewarded by a green workforce. This includes jobs for planting trees and cultivating meadows (in abandoned lots and on rooftops), but more importantly, this also includes jobs for maintaining – stewarding – these projects long after they’ve been installed. Institutionalizing a green workforce will make it possible for us to live in harmony with nature (or developing climate resilient communities) while also putting food on the table. 

The green workforce is one of the fastest growing industries today, and that growth is here to stay as evidenced by the Biden Administration’s demonstrated commitment through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. This legislation is a historic investment towards achieving a climate resilient economy at all levels – from the federal to the state and municipal levels. 

In fact, Trenton has already begun to benefit from this historic investment: several organizations have partnered with the city to secure a $1.3 million grant to plant 1,000 trees across the city over three years between 2023 and 2025. This investment will be transformative for the health of our city, but it must be the beginning of a multi-faceted effort to improve Trenton’s environmental health. 

We need greater investment in training a green workforce all the way down through to high school students. I have engaged with students at my school that must balance getting an education with making money to help their families pay the bills. This should not be a reality for kids so young. Instead, green workforce development opportunities should be married with educational requirements. This could mean providing students with stipends and course credits for participating through programs like the New Jersey Tree Ambassadors program led by the New Jersey Conservation Foundation and Outdoor equity alliance, of which I am a part. It may also take the form of co-operative experiential learning programs, which link university students with companies and organizations (think NJ Conservation Foundation, Outdoor Equity Alliance, or even Capital City Farms) to gain necessary skills to succeed outside the classroom. Importantly, investment in green workforce development through students still in school helps to ensure that Trenton’s environmental health is maintained well into the future.

Our planet is as warm as it’s ever been in the course of human history, while communities like Trenton struggle mightily to achieve a decent standard of living. To answer Attorney General Platkin’s prompt, I think that at this critical juncture, Trenton must focus on building itself into a place where people can root themselves, and it must do so by investing in the future health of its communities, which includes the health of its environment. 

Jevon Lin is a Trenton Central High school student living in Trenton. He is a member of the Mercer County Community College Upward Bound Program and is a member of the Outdoor Equity Alliance’s Trenton Tree Ambassador Program.