More Than Trees: How One D.C. Program Is Investing in Parks and People
Steve Coleman, the co-founder and executive director of Washington Parks & People, on the current state of DC Green Corps and why its mission is especially important in 2025
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This story is part of Hola Cultura’s investigative series “The Shade Gap.” The series is supported with funds from SpotlightDC with reporting by participants in Hola Cultura’s Storytelling Program for Experiential Learning and co published with the Washington City Paper. The story was written by Trinity Orosco, edited by Christine MacDonald, Hola Cultura’s executive director and editor and copy edited by Rebecca Louden, Kami Waller and Gail O’Hara.
More than 30 years ago, Steve Coleman and a group of volunteers formed an anti-crime community watch group and began patrolling Meridian Hill Park—also known as Malcolm X Park—in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. Their commitment was simple: to greet park visitors and cultivate a sense of community.
What began as a small volunteer effort eventually grew into Washington Parks & People, a citywide force for environmental reclamation. As co-founder and executive director, Coleman has dedicated more than three decades to transforming neglected green spaces into hubs for healing and community.
In 2009, Washington Parks & People was awarded a major federal stimulus grant from the U.S. Forest Service to pilot the DC Green Corps—a workforce training program addressing inequities in access to green spaces and offering employment and economic opportunities. Today, with a diversified mix of funding and partners, the Corps is becoming a lasting intergenerational community job readiness, leadership and service program. To date, the program has graduated 259 residents, including many who were formerly incarcerated. It also serves individuals who have been historically excluded from traditional career pathways, equipping them with hands-on training in park restoration, green infrastructure and urban forestry, and providing certifications that lead to careers in environmental and public works.
Today, as federal funding for workforce development and environmental justice programs face uncertainty, Coleman’s commitment to D.C. neighborhoods remains steadfast.
“It’s not about empowering, because people have the power,” he says. It’s “just about helping them find the power they’ve always had.”
Hola Cultura interviewed Coleman to discuss the purpose of DC Green Corps and why its mission is especially important in 2025, as Washington faces the impacts of climate change, growing inequities in access to green space and the need for sustainable career pathways.
How does the DC Green Corps serve communities that have been systemically excluded from the environmental field?
Most of the people who have gone through the program have been from the east side of the Anacostia River, which is where a lot of the biggest challenges and most discrimination have historically been. We made a point of not looking for applicants who were perfect, but looking for people who needed this the most. So we made a point of reaching out to returned citizens and connecting with them.
We’re working in the same places where people have needs because environmental justice, racial justice and human justice all kind of group together. So the same neighborhoods that have been dumped on through discrimination against people have also been environmentally dumped on, and they need our help the most.
You mentioned that critical environmental programs are starting to be defunded. Can you elaborate on what cuts you’re seeing?
One thing that happens in the work we do is funders don’t think that working on green space is meeting urgent human needs. So funders will cut back when there’s serious threats to basic human needs. What people don’t realize is that having places to get together safely and peacefully outside is a basic human need.
One of the things that’s happened through the years is we’ve been a host for rising community forestry and environmental leaders from all over the developing world in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service [via the U.S. Forest Service’s International Visitor Program, an exchange initiative that gives visitors an immersive, hands-on experience in U.S. community forestry]. Because of the cancellation of the U.S. Agency for International Development, that program is now dead in the water.
After all these years, what keeps you going when working for this program, especially in the face of funding or policy setbacks?
The kids. The kids come each day with new dreams, new ideas and new energy about what our outdoors can mean for their lives and for their communities. People say kids are the leaders of tomorrow; we say that’s nonsense. They’re leaders of today, if we listen to them. Through our Green Corps program, we’re lifting up young people as Junior Park Rangers, where they’re helping to leave the parks often better than the adults do.
We’ve partnered [with the School of Harvest, the Riverseed School and Blue Montessori] in creating a Montessori school in Marvin Gaye Park, where seven young people were embedded with us all year in this experiment. They ended up running the park. We thought we were teaching them, but really, they were teaching us and leading us. So, unquestionably, the thing that keeps me going with all the difficulty is the young people who are bringing such tremendous, undying enthusiasm and energy into our environment.
How do you envision the role of urban green jobs shifting in the next decade, especially with climate change intensifying?
The environment is critical. This is our lifeline. So the frontier of green jobs is immense. Most jobs are going to need to be green in one way or another. They’re going to need to be grounded in sustainability, resilience and environmental justice for all. We’re seeing a retrenching right now where, as we said, all these basic programs are being completely defunded.
What that’s going to do is make it that much clearer to people in the next two or three years just how critical these places are. When you defund them, you’re destroying the lifeline that everybody depends on. So while the immediate future is grim, I believe that the future of this work is bright because it has to be. Because we need this work more than anything.
What impact do you hope Washington Parks & People can leave?
I think that we have an immediate job to do in showing everybody how important community is. We tend to be stuck on our phones and thinking about all the virtual connections we can make. But we need a living, breathing community where we see and touch the people around us. Nature heals us. It softens us. It strengthens us. It nurtures us in so many ways, and it asks nothing in return but that we show some respect for it—that we try to be part of healing it and not destroying it.
In the past few months, where people are traumatized by all the things happening in the world, I’ve seen people needing that community more than ever. These are things that I think we have a tremendous obligation and opportunity to stand up for.
View all the stories in “The Shade Gap” series.
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