What we’re all about

GROW your career across oceans and beyond borders

Our Mission

GROW (Green Revitalization Outreach Workforce) Externships is committed to solving a classic challenge of environmental projects being unable to flourish while creating a pipeline of high ability and decorated experts in the field of sustainability to help save our evolving planet. We support externs from underrepresented groups and expand accessibility to careers in environmental science and related fields. We coordinate a program for people newly entering the environmental science workforce to rapidly build their credentials which not only expedites their training but additionally assists in-need populations and projects in the process.

As of January 2022, we’ve supported extern cohorts that have been 52% BIPOC and 50% women participants.

What We Do

GROW Externships (Green Revitalization Outreach Workforce) is a 501(c)(3) designed for people newly entering the environmental science workforce to rapidly build their credentials in a way that not only expedites their training but additionally assists an in-need population. Vetted professionals are granted the opportunity of gaining managerial level experience at greenspaces in Japan, Hawaii, and beyond, building high level abilities in a unique arena over a short period of time. A central aspect of our program is compensating participants with monetary honorariums to externs of all economic backgrounds (for international students who are not permitted to receive paid compensation, we provide travel expense scholarships). We do this to provide the greatest possible access to participants. Externs don’t have to face undue financial burden to be part of the program, as the costs are compensated to ensure a cash positive scenario. Our environmental partners in Japan and Hawaii requiring assistance in the field are able to secure staff that is traditionally otherwise unavailable on a local level, creating a win-win scenario for all people involved.

This program models the successful career growth that GROW founder Max Lerner has personally seen through incorporating farming experience into a developing scientist’s experience base.

GROW Externships is a 501(c)(3) program fiscally sponsored by NYC-based grassroots community-operated not-for-profit incubator, Prime Produce Limited (EIN: 26-1188925).

About Our Founder

With nearly 20 years of experience developing green roofs and urban farms for New York City, Max Lerner directs environmental initiatives of the Emerging Technologies team of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. In that capacity, Max has implemented countless environment pilots for the city covering a broad range of sustainability goals. Max is able to achieve this bold scope of work through the collaborative efforts of a rotating think tank of approximately 100 scientific visionaries who continually manages to bring cutting-edge environmental ideas to life for the public.

A Timeline

2018: The Beginning

An idea sparks. On a casual trip to Japan, our founder, Max, happened to meet several local farmers. In conversations with them and with local friends, he learned about the labor shortage in Japanese agriculture. He became inspired to launch a program that could connect these farmers with enthusiastic budding professionals around the world. The year was spent dreaming up what that program could look like and conducting exploratory research.

January 2019: GROW’s Inaugural Trip

Max made GROW’s first trip, to Shimane and Tottori Prefectures in Japan. In this operational trip, Max arrived without externs to explore the plausibility of his plan. He’d been to Japan many times before and was aware of the potential to help extend environmental practices there. He knew there was a local need for young farmers that were able bodied, who could help manage land and had an interest in sustainability and resilience. He met with local strawberry farmers and residents of the area to lay the groundwork for GROW’s extern pilot run.

April 2019: Second Trip (Japan)

GROW’s second Japan cohort launched with two test volunteers to try out the concept. The test externs volunteered on a strawberry farm, an organic farm for leafy greens, planting pumpkins, and helping other local agriculture fixtures. Our team deepened our understanding of traditional Japanese farming, met with potential partners, and found that volunteers were more than eager to meet the challenge of an intense outdoor work schedule.

August 2019: Third Trip (Japan)

GROW’s third trip was also its first official extern cohort with participants outside of the GROW board or test volunteers. A group of students and developing professionals arrived and worked on an orange farm, strawberry farms, green roof growhouse, and other local spaces while learning about local growing practices and conditions. We piloted homestays as a housing option and hired the first extern who would serve as a Field Coordinator, a role we’d come to utilize even more in the future.

March 2020: GROW’s Inaugural Hawai’i Trip (Fourth Trip)

In the months just before the Covid-19 pandemic, one of GROW’s earliest professional partners secured a large parcel of land on O’ahu, Hawai’i that they planned to steward. Hawai’i is home to many treasured and vulnerable native species, but is also unfortunately the extinction capital of the world. The state offers many potential opportunities for hard-working volunteers to help improve land access and harmony, so GROW launched a trip to explore the possibility of expanding its work to the islands. Our cohort of volunteers included an alum of our third Japan trip (our first repeat extern!), GROW board members, and several other eager test volunteers.

We spent large amounts of time on the land parcel, which was by then named Enchanted Gardens and became our flagship Hawai’i site. There, we worked the land and explored how we could best cultivate and preserve its natural beauty. Our cohort met with the Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources, the local parks department, colleges, food banks, community gardens, museums, and science practitioners to assess where there was most need for helping hands and sustainable support. In the background of this trip, Covid-19 was becoming an increasingly urgent and restrictive problem. While we didn’t know it at the time, travel to Japan was about to become inaccessible for several years. Through this foundational work with our Hawai’i program, we were able to set the stage to continue our goal of three GROW trips per year, even among international border closures.

August 2020: Fifth Trip (Hawai’i)

GROW embarked on another trip to Hawai’i, this time in the midst of Covid-19, which meant a strictly mandated two-week quarantine to keep Hawai’i safe before pursuing our service goals in the field. We brought along a team of ideal test candidates who were ready for the responsibility of a quarantine and eager to hit the ground running once finished. After our quarantine, we dove into land management work, learning about local invasive species, helping with local food pantry work, visiting botanical gardens, clearing community gardens, and getting to know scientists we could assist in potential green roofing projects.

December 2020: Sixth Trip (Hawai’i)

Just like our third Japan trip, our third Hawai’i trip was our first at this destination with official externs. We brought along a group of approximately a dozen developing professionals. We piloted camping at several sites as well as staying at a local hostel as a housing option, and took part in beach cleanups, worked with the Conservation Council For Hawai’i, and cared for albatross nesting grounds with North Shore Community Land Trust and continued caring for local community gardens. Our support was especially appreciated as Hawai’i was experiencing staffing shortages during that time. This trip served as our first time working with Waimea Valley, a significant cultural site and botanical garden that would become one of our most prolific partnerships. This was the first of many cohorts in which externs were energized enough to stay beyond the scope of our programming and continue working in their newfound home.

April 2021: Seventh Trip (Hawai’i)

On this trip, we hosted students at two different youth hostels: one on the North Shore and one in Honolulu. We did our first full-week engagement with Waimea Valley, as well as participating in coastal cleanups, community gardening, food pantry volunteering, and work with the Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources. We returned to many established partnerships as well as adding new partners to our program. On this trip we strengthened GROW’s cultural immersion arm, inviting externs to learn more about Hawai’ian culture and the deep importance of respect for the land. We had the honor of spending time with local cultural educators and Native Hawai’ian practitioners and set out to continue to expand that component of the program. We were honored to participate in a sacred coconut planting ceremony on the University of Hawai'i campus, work which has flourished into deeply immersive cultural experiences. This trip was also our first time hiring repeat externs who had graduated the program to return as Field Coordinators. This pivot to utilizing Field Coordinators who had previously experienced the full program made this trip infinitely more seamless. We also saw even more externs staying in Hawai'i than our past cohort, an encouraging sign that the experience deeply resonated with program participants.

September 2021: GROW’s Inaugural Costa Rica Trip (Eighth Trip)

Our Costa Rica program came directly from the professional growth of one of GROW’s own graduates! Janet, an extern alum of the Hawai’i program, became inspired on the trip to continue her educational travels after the cohort ended. She went on to take part in a study abroad program in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Monteverde’s cloud forest has proven particularly vulnerable to damage from climate change, such as land erosion. Janet took the initiative to coordinate GROW’s first Costa Rica cohort. Board members arrived in Monteverde and met many of the experts and students she’d connected with during her studies. We spent time with the stewards of local botanical gardens, conservationists, land owners, universities, community garden groups and museum curators. We began formal partnership conversations with Valle Escondido Nature Reserve Hotel & Farm and the Monteverde Biological Research Station. The Urban Wild, a partner program with similar goals to GROW, later sponsored Janet to do further coordination and research in this region and beyond for GROW.

October 2021: Exploratory GROW Pennsylvania Visit

Between cohorts, GROW board members took an exploratory day trip to Lakshmi Cow Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania, where we hope to establish programming in the near future. We met with the sanctuary’s incredible founder and assessed where externs could be of most help on the farm. We are slated to have further meetings with the coordinators of the space, with the hopes of making this a destination for short but impactful week/weekend training cohorts.

December 2021 - January 2022: Ninth Trip (Hawai’i)

With this cohort, GROW established an ongoing rhythm with our Hawai’i program, visiting repeat partner sites and deepening strong on-site connections. We spent a full week working with Waimea Valley, continued our work with organizations like the Malama Learning Center, the Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Conservation Council for Hawai'i, the North Shore Community Land Trust, local food drives, community gardens and other established partners. We continued to deepen our cultural immersion programming with local leaders both at the University of Hawai’i campus as well as working constructing a coconut nurseries on their homestead.

On this trip we were also fortunate to receive sponsorship from First LAP Men’s Transitional Housing, where we helped revitalize their onsite garden and painted a mural. At this time, Hawai’i was experiencing a widespread rental car shortage and a spike in gas prices, and First LAP stepped up to generously rent us a van at a meaningful discount. First LAP even hired one of our externs after the GROW program concluded and provided them housing, and we look forward to working with them further in the future.

We piloted relying on campground style housing as our flagship accommodation this trip, spending much of our time at the popular campsite Camp Palehua. This was our second time expanding our programming length to a month, as three weeks had begun to feel too short to create full immersion and participate in all the opportunities we’d created. This cohort was our first time hiring Field Coordinators who were experts the sustainability field to lead workshops as well as programs facilitation.

In this cohort, a pattern we’d noticed for a while continued to grow: externs were finding such a connection with the locations of our trips that they’d choose to stand behind after the program ended, often working for one of our partners. Several externs from this cohort took this route and continued to enrich their careers in Hawai’i after the end of our time with them, more than had ever stayed during past programs.

April 2022: Tenth Trip (Japan)

As travel restrictions in Japan slightly eased to welcome business travelers, our founder Max made a return to Japan for GROW’s tenth trip. We got to spend much-awaited time with members of our sister nonprofit, GROW JP, whose board consists mainly of partners and agriculture professionals in the Shimane Prefecture.

In the time since GROW’s last visit in 2019, board members on both sides of the ocean were hard at work building a foundation for our future when it will be safe and permissible for externs to travel to Japan again. While the borders were closed, the Japan team created an unstaffed farmstand where partner farmers from can safely sell their produce. They set up Airbnb-style housing where externs can stay and supported a framework for GROW JP to become its own sister nonprofit.

In this eagerly awaited return, Max spent three weeks meeting with our incredible local partners, farmers, and city officials, including the new mayor of GROW Japan's home base, Yasugi. GROW met with World English School to solidify plans for translators, coordinators and to sponsor their programming. We additionally secured an international office as well as agricultural land that GROW will be stewarding moving forward. Local farmers are enthusiastic about bringing back externs, and we can’t wait to see what GROW Japan's future holds. When the time comes for externs to return to Japan’s borders, we will be more than ready.

Looking Ahead:

We’re gearing up for GROW’s eleventh trip in July, which will take us back to Hawai’i. On the horizon, we are looking toward a potential pilot trip to Nairobi, Kenya in partnership with The Urban Wild in the third quarter, as well as a potential return to Japan in late 2022. We are continuing to strengthen our plans for upcoming Costa Rica cohorts and potential Pennsylvania programming. We are actively accepting applications for future cohorts and couldn’t be more excited for the future!