Yale University

Class News

1964 Class Council continues URI support

February 20, 2019

The 2018 URI intern supported by the Class of 1964 is Ethan Ross. Here are some details provided by URI, the Urban Resources Initiative of New Haven.

Ethan Ross is a sophomore in Yale College who is working toward a double major in environmental studies and economics. He graduated from Abington Heights High School, near Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2017, where he served as captain of the state Envirothon team for two years.

Ethan is an avid runner who loves spending time outdoors in any capacity. For the past five years, Ethan has also worked as a local landscaper in Clarks Summit, PA.

In the future, Ethan plans to concentrate his academic studies on localized conservation approaches and eventually start a career in the environmental mitigation field.

Ethan was excited to join URI's Greenspace team for the summer, with the goal of directly affecting environmental change in New Haven communities. Ethan was an enthusiastic learner and absorbed knowledge of urban forestry from URI staff, his fellow interns, and community members. He aspired to spend his summer with URI learning about the practical application of forestry tools and the importance of environmental restoration and community building in an urban context. He had a successful internship!

Ethan worked with 7 Greenspace groups:

  • Truman Street Green Team (in the Hill)
  • Fort Hale Park (in East Shore)
  • Lower State Street (downtown)
  • Bradley Street (in Wooster Square)
  • Cherry Ann Park (in Newhallville)
  • Shepard Street (an Emeritus group in Newhallville)
  • Clifton Street River Garden (a new group in Fair Haven)

During the 2018 summer of Greenspace, Ethan supported:

  • 66 unique volunteers
  • 334 community service hours
  • 42 community events
  • 4 trees, 29 shrubs, and 43 perennial plantings
  • 3.5 yards of compost, 19.5 yards of mulch spreading

Since 2010 the Class of 1964 has provided annual support for an intern to work in New Haven with URI:

  • 2010 Anna Ruth Pickett
  • 2011 Amy Zvonar
  • 2012 Jancy Langley
  • 2013 Sumana Serchen
  • 2014 Katherine Beechem
  • 2015 Uma Bhandaram
  • 2016 Max Webster
  • 2017 Cara Donovan
  • 2018 Ethan Ross

In 2019 URI will embark on our 25th year of supporting New Haven and Yale students to work together through the Community Greenspace program.  We are grateful to the Class of 1964 for your ongoing support of a Yale intern, which is critical to sustaining our important town-gown effort.

URI Community Greenspace

In 1995 URI launched the Community Greenspace program to create an opportunity for Yale graduate students to gain urban community forestry skills while being responsive to needs identified by the New Haven community. The program is designed to foster a mutual pathway of learning with Yale students sharing their urban forestry knowledge with residents, who in turn share their understanding and experience of how to best carry out projects in their neighborhoods.  The program is focused on community-driven urban forestry activities, such as planting street trees, recovering derelict vacant lots into pocket-parks, and restoring neglected landscapes (invasive species management, etc.).

Since the program’s inception, URI has continuously responded to and engaged 17,961 volunteers over 24 years, with an average of 748 volunteers annually.  URI provides the volunteers all the material resources to carry out the projects (trees, shrubs, perennials, tools, compost, mulch, stone) and technical resources through the Yale intern.  Each intern has a portfolio of 6 or 7 groups to support, typically meeting them on a weekly basis to design and implement planting efforts.

The locations volunteers identify as priorities for restoring run the gamut from publicly-owned land, such as parks and curb strips, to publicly-oriented spaces, such as vacant lots and even front yards.  Front yard work is only conducted in low income neighborhoods and conjunction with soil lead testing to determine the safety of the work and lead remediation plans, if necessary.

The Greenspace program is grassroots driven with volunteers self-organized into groups, such as block-watches, park friends and other groups less formally established. Residents identify where they wish to work, carry out the physical labor to achieve their project goals and commit to long-term stewardship.  Groups can elect to continue to participate in the program on an ongoing basis and continue to determine their community’s environmental priorities and to initiate new projects or objectives over time. Since the program’s commencement, 298 different groups have participated with an average tenure of 4 years and a max of 23 years. “Park Friends” or volunteers engaged in recovering vacant lots typically have the longest tenure.

The aim of the Greenspace program is to empower residents to manage their environment to meet their own aspirations.  Primary goals include environmental restoration, stewardship and community building. Supporting residents to work together on shared ambitions, results in strong bonds formed among residents, which can contribute to safer and healthier neighborhoods. Engaging residents as the driving force to increase tree canopy, shrub and groundcover layers, and to improve soils (including lead removal) results in sustained improvements. Moreover, the volunteers and Yale students alike have a deeper understanding of managing natural resources in our city.

In the summer of 2018:

  • 770 volunteers (including 583 community members and 187 Yale student volunteers)
  • 3944 community service hours (including 3080 hours completed by community volunteers and 864 hours completed by Yale student volunteers)
  • 291 events
  • 44 trees, 153 shrubs, and 616 perennials planted and 120 yards of mulch spread