GROW [Green Revitalization Outreach Workforce] Externships: Project Overview

Project Summary

GROW Externships is a program designed to diversify, train, and empower people newly entering the environmental science workforce to rapidly build their credentials toward true career traction through dynamic fieldwork. Participants join, travel, explore, and learn with cohorts of developing professionals who collectively contribute helping hands to ensure that the project’s local partners across the sites GROW assists are able to flourish. Through alliances with both national and international organizations and sites, GROW Externships is actively developing the next generation of environmental experts through collaboratively channeling their unique skills to build a more sustainable world.

How Does it Work?

Professionals are vetted by the GROW administrative team and then granted the opportunity to gain further job experience assisting environmental sites in exciting locations, building high level abilities in unique settings over a short period of time and earning a paid honorarium in the process. In Japan, rural farm partners in the prefectures of Shimane and Tottori, the least- and second least-populated locations in the country, are enabled by GROW to secure staff who would otherwise be unavailable on a local level. In Hawaii, the extinction capital of the planet, GROW is able to lend vitally needed help to defend the diminishing biodiversity and overall environmental functionality in this quickly evolving greenspace. It is through this cultural collaboration that GROW is able to share their global best practices and help ensure that the next generation of emerging and diverse environmental leaders are part of the preservation and expansion of these spaces sustainable history, creating a win-win scenario for all parties involved.

Who the Project Serves

There is a massive challenge in gaining career footing in the environmental sciences as it’s still a very new and undefined career horizon. As such, developing professionals frequently find difficulty in securing truly substantial work in this still blossoming sector. Through rapid professional training, GROW offers a way to develop externs’ skills to quickly help them gain the fieldwork and credibility needed to bridge the uncanny valley that exists in the working world which frequently prevents securing true career roles.

Project Goals

This project taps into the expertise of externs coordinated by GROW in an effort to offer them additional opportunities to build their professional stories and backgrounds. These conduits of skill-building are focused on diversifying the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) fields to a broader range of candidates. As of 2021, our programming currently upholds 50% BIPOC and 41% women/LGBTQ participant engagement, extending opportunities to underrepresented groups beyond their homes. Programs are made up of cutting-edge teams to activate dynamic environmental pilots focused on sustainability, conservation, food production, land management, and more. Participants work with locals on projects which the locals themselves identify as needing additional helping hands. They provide said assistance and learn in tandem with partners, ensuring their projects flourish while additionally blossoming their professional backgrounds in the process to help rapidly expedite their career journey.

What Happens Next

With additional funding, we would be able to support more externs with honorariums and create short-term roles to secure more sustainable streams of funding. There’s no question that this project and the people it serves are primed to do more, and there’s no shortage of professionals who GROW can activate. We are only limited by resources to give well-earned credit for more developing professionals hard work.