Green infrastructure training for Hispanic landscape professionals kickstarts during Hispanic Heritage Month

On October 5, 2024, EcoLatinos launched its first ever Latino Landscape Professionals Green Infrastructure training program. While there are many training programs for landscape professionals available in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, some even being in Spanish, this will be the first specifically designed for Latinx experiences and culture.

As a style of landscape design, green infrastructure includes any effort to incorporate nature into developed areas, like rain gardens, street trees and green roofs. These practices help reduce the stormwater runoff that makes its way into the Bay from urban and suburban neighborhoods. While the demand for this work is high, there is often a lack of landscape professionals trained to implement green infrastructure, a gap that EcoLatinos plans on filling.

Founded by environmentalist Ruby Stemmle, EcoLatinos was created to amplify the voices of the Latino communities in their pursuit of social and environmental justice through outreach, education and activism. The nonprofit equips Latino communities with the awareness and training to make a difference in their community through actions like tree plantings, stream cleanup and rain garden installation. Because Latinx communities often lack resources and opportunities to find out about green jobs such as green infrastructure landscaping, Stemmle says that EcoLatinos outreach efforts are fundamentally about "meeting people where they are" and "connecting with people in their own environments."

The Latino Landscape Professionals Green Infrastructure training program, which is being funded for one year through a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant, will last four weeks with training every Saturday. The first two sessions will cover stormwater mitigation practices like rain gardens, rain barrels and tree plantings. The remaining sessions will prepare participants to install these projects. In total, 36 landscape professionals from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. are entered into the pilot program.

In planning this program, EcoLatinos sent out a survey that received 280 responses from Latino landscapers asking what they would like to learn, what they would like to improve in their work and when training would fit into their schedules. The survey responses showed that professionals preferred weekend training, so that they didn’t have to miss work, and wanted the training to be entirely in Spanish instead of both Spanish and English.

Respondents also said that in addition to green infrastructure training, they were interested in learning about plant identification—particularly invasive versus native species—as these differ from the nature in their native countries.

According to Stemmle, hispanic communities are often more concerned about environmental and climate issues than other groups. Many Latinos living in the Chesapeake Bay watershed grew up on farms or work outdoors and have firsthand experience with the effects of droughts, flooding and pollution, and therefore understand the value of protecting natural resources.

“There's a natural inclination in our community to nurture, to protect, to be stewards of the environment,” Stemmle said.

As a pilot program, the training has funding available for one year, but EcoLatinos hopes to find funding to continue and expand this program in the future.

By offering this kind of training, the organization is not only preparing Hispanic communities for jobs within the green workforce, but also helping to achieve critical clean water goals for the Bay.

“All of the work that [EcoLatinos] does is about water,” Stemmle said.