Native Plants Green Roof at Mississippi Watershed Management Organization

The following blog post was written by Jeremy Alsaker, Sustainability Educator at Spark-Y.

At Spark-Y we love winter, even as we enter the dreaded stretch of cold from January through March. Why? Because we have the chance to plan for what we’re going to do in the Spring! To help us get through the next few cold months, we embrace the opportunity to plan our spring and summer plantings and projects. Planning is vital to all our projects, especially those that involve planting. In particular, native plants require a lot of planning since many of them have specific times when they can put down roots. We especially like planning and planting when our youth can be involved. So, that is why we are so excited to begin another project with the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO). Starting this February, we will be working with the MWMO to install a green rooftop on their headquarters in Minneapolis. 

Photo of Noble Rot rooftop in Portland, OR. Photo taken from their website.

We previously partnered with the MWMO to build a hydroponics system on their rooftop and have seen firsthand the great work the MWMO does for the community, and up and down our region of the Mississippi.

The MWMO’s green roof (seen here in September 2016) captures stormwater and slows the flow of runoff from the building. Green roofs provide a variety of benefits for the building occupants as well as to the environment.

In their own words: “The MWMO encompasses 25,309 acres (39.5 square miles) of fully developed urban lands and waters. We partner with our member communities to invest in green infrastructure that captures, cleans and reuses stormwater runoff. Our team monitors and tracks water quality in the watershed and conducts education and outreach to promote active environmental stewardship among residents.”

Aerial image of MWMO building and property showing proximity of building to Mississippi River to the west (left side of image). Image taken from Google Earth 2023.

Their mission “to lead, and to foster stewardship of the watershed with actions that promote civic ownership and responsibility and through measures that achieve diverse and functional ecosystems” will help us reach our goals of empowering youth to learn about sustainability. 

How can we not be excited?

The MWMO reached out to Spark-Y to improve their green infrastructure at their headquarters in Northeast Minneapolis (just a hop, skip, and a jump from our own HQ). The MWMO already practices many water-saving strategies on their property, including rainwater storage, permeable pavers, rain gardens, and earthworks. We are excited to extend their efforts to the roof! 

Green roofs provide many ecological services if executed properly. They help to slow the flow of stormwater, which reduces erosion and pollution runoff, and lengthens the life of management systems. Additionally, green roofs reduce the energy needed to heat or cool a building by providing shade, thermal mass, and insulation. Our green roof in particular will provide habitat for native species of both flora and fauna, which is at a premium in urban environments.

Image of the layers involved in a green rooftop installation, including non-permeable layers, a rockbed layer, soil and then a plant layer. Photo taken from Knapp, & Schmauck, Sebastian & Zehnsdorf, Andreas. (2019). Biodiversity Impact of Green Roofs and Constructed Wetlands as Progressive Eco-Technologies in Urban Areas. Sustainability. 11. 5846. 10.3390/su11205846. 

Rooftop planter with natives from designer Julie Farris for Gardenista - taken from their website (photo by Matthew Williams)

Starting this month, we will be enlisting the help of our youth partners to renovate and expand the green roof on the top of the MWMO headquarters. The rest of this winter and early spring, we will be educating our youth on green roof best practices, how to work safely, and the native plant species which will be soon growing up there. They will be designing the layout and infrastructure, deciding which plants to plant, and, when the time comes, they will install the whole thing (with a little help from our wonderful staff)! We are excited to spend the rest of the winter planning, prepping, and looking forward to that first thaw.

Please follow along as we reveal more and share updates on our social media channels, here on our blog and in our newsletter. If you have a youth that you think would be interested in joining us on this or any of our other projects, or if you think this is the kind of event you would like to volunteer at, please reach out here on our website.

Photo of the rooftop garden atop the City of Chicago City Hall Building in downtown Chicago - taken from the City of Chicago website.

A crowd of people learning about rooftop gardening at Toronto Urban Growers - taken from their website (photo by Ivan Emke).

Nurturing & Ownership -- An Intern's Experience At Spark-Y

Hi My name is Rola Cao, a rising-sophmore student from Macalester College and I am the Curriculum and Training Intern at Spark-Y in summer of 2022. My internship lasted 11 weeks from end of May to mid-August and it is my first ever in-person full-time internship.

Internship Overview

During my internship, I provided and supervised 12 high school youth with hands-on experiences that lead to empowerment 3+ days a week. On the past 6 professional development days, I developed, planned, and facilitated activities for Spark-Y Summer Annual Internship that include: career exploration, resume writing, leadership skills, career readiness for high school + aged youth.

Besides my role in summer internship planning, I was also on the team of impact measurement and curriculum design. With my ArcGIS cartography skills, I created an impact map to visualize the range of Spark-Y programs throughout St. Paul, Minneapolis, and greater Twin Cities area. Moreover, during the course of 8 weeks, I developed two lessons on the topic of environmental justice from scratch and hopefully they will be used in high school classrooms this fall.

Why Spark-Y

Looking back at my internship journey, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work at Spark-Y as a full-time intern. As a college student exploring career options, what Spark-Y provided me exceeded my expectations for an internship. Spark-Y is such a resourceful organization that offered me a variety of working experiences ranging from hands-on activities to strategic plannings. I was able to choose from the tasks and build my internship task bank which maximizes my advantages and challenges my comfort zone. I absolutely love the flexibility of Spark-Y which allowed me to try out new experiences, rotate in different roles, and choose the tasks that suit me the most. New ideas and proposals are welcomed here for further discussion and feedback which eventually led me to making new maps and designing new lesson plans based on my personal interest and skills. I appreciate the diversity in the Spark-Y team and the diverseness of its partnerships. As a non-profit organization, Spark-Y not only gave me the opportunity to learn more about community organizations like Project Sweetie Pie and Minneapolis Farmer’s Market, it also gave me the chance to connect with people from corporations like Cargill, Medtronic, and General Mill. Before this internship, if you tell me I will be visiting the corporation's office and inviting their senior staff to join the youth empowerment events I planned from scratch, I wouldn’t believe it. But now, walking out of this internship, I have more confidence in communication, networking, and business etiquettes than I was before.

Two Key Words

When I was asked what word would I use to describe the highlight and the challenge of this internship, I said the words “Nurturing” and “Ownership”.

Almost all work at Spark-Y circles around nurturing youth and nurturing the environment. Essentially, by nurturing youth how to nurturing plants and the community, we are empowering youth through the concept of sustainability. It is delightful and rewarding to witness the growth and progress on our youth. A big portion of my role is to find out how to nurture youth in professional development and career readiness. I tailored the professional development day to be more engaging for youth by increasing interactive activities. Moreover, in the process of nurturing our youth, I am also being nurtured by the Spark-Y family. I see tasks as learning opportunity instead of work that has to be done. By each week, I grew in both confidence and skills; Now, by the end of my internship, I am equipped with a variety of transferable career skills that are ready to be applied in my next workplace. Spark-Y work culture gave me so much flexibility and positive energy which encouraged me to take the most out of this internship.

As the key word for challenge, “ownership” summarized how I reached out of my comfort zone and transformed in the process of my internship. Spark-Y family gave me lots of trust and guidance which helped me succeed as the lead for professional development program. English is my second language and working in a full-English environment can be challenging, especially when my work is large involved in public speaking, communication outreach, and team collaborations. Taking the ownership of my work is the promise to take initiative, be creative, and implement the plan with the team support. Now I can see myself capable of leading a small team and execute high quality events.

On the Right Track

Hello Spark-Y Family!

We are the Right Track Summer Internship Team which consists of Jaraide Dassovi (Lead), Navious Bogan, Best Yang, and Eh Ler Vang. This summer our team was responsible for 3 general projects, Harold Mezile YMCA North, STEM Saturday and Harvest Best Academy! Outside of these projects, we’ve had a blast on the field trip to Lake Bde Maka Ska and enhancing our professional development skills in weekly sessions. Meet our team members and the experiences that impacted us most!

Hello my name is Best Yang an intern at Spark-Y that started working this summer.

Here at Spark-Y we work to benefit and help the community so that they can learn about STEM and planting in general. Earlier this summer me and some of my co-workers went to City Hall to plant some flowers at the entrance of the building.

City Hall asked if we could help them by planting some new flowers at the front door of the building. When me and my coworkers were told about the plans to plant flowers at City Hall I was feeling excited to go there because I never went to City Hall in my entire life before until now. When we went to City Hall it was a very hot day out in the sun with little to no shade to hide under. By the end of the day we were all tired being out in the sun and just wanted to go to an area with AC.

This project helps the city in the long run by making sure that pollinators like bees will stick around the area and have pollen and nectar to feed on. I believe that by doing this I can help pollinators by providing pollen and nectar. Something that I learned from this is how to plant flowers because I never planted one before. Also by making pollinator  gardens you are providing resources to pollinators which will help them accomplish the great work they do! - Best Yang

Hello my name is Navious Bogan and I'm a summer intern for Spark-Y. During the Bde Maka Ska field trip, I learned how to canoe in under 20 minutes. I faced my fear of being in the middle of a large body of water. In my time while working for Spark-Y I did a wide variety of things, I planted at the City Hall, and maintained the YMCA aquaponics systems this system is located at Harold Mezile North Community YMCA. I cleaned out the system and tested the water to make sure everything was okay.  One of my favorite projects was the Cargill project where volunteers help build STEM kits. The STEM kits that were being built were the zombie apocalypse, there used for building vegetables such as Broccoli,Pea, and more. This project was held at Cargill, Inc. in Wayzata, MN.

 - Navious bogan

”It was very hot” - Eh Ler 

Building Joy

This season Spark-Y reached a more dynamic age range 1st-8th grade. Our summer programming focused on bridging environmental stewardship with a healthy lifestyle. We incorporated this education by engaging the scholars in agricultural practices and lessons on a small scale, such as gardening and understanding the cultural and nutritional value of fresh produce. One of the most popular lessons being produce dissections!

One of the deliverables for the Summer Internship Right Track Team is to design and build a school garden at Harvest Best Academy. We have spent a total of 4 days building this raised bed. Most days were bright and sunny but we did get rained on twice! It has been a joy watching the Right Track Interns learn new, or enhance, their hard skills working with tools such as drills and learning how to assemble a build using a blueprint. As we wrap up this build, we are happy to say the Special Education Department will be utilizing the garden during the 2022-23 school year! Thank you to the Community Education Team Summer Interns and Jordan Bergstrom, Spark-Y Sustainable Systems Manager, for their support and infectious enthusiasm to complete this project! - Grace Cisneros, Sustainability Educator and Right Track Staff Lead.