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A cohort of Miami Dade College students planting native landscaping in the 10-mile linear park running below the Metrorail, dubbed the Underline, could serve as a blueprint for other cities across the US when crafting solutions to balance new development with delicate ecosystems.

Now in its second year, the Friends of the Underline’s Green Leaders program recruits Miami Dade College students for paid internships to help build out and restore Florida’s natural ecosystems along the Underline, a public-private partnership to transform 120 acres of underutilized land from the Miami River to the Dadeland South Station into a community space with bike and walking paths as well as art installations.

“Green Leaders is an immersive experience working on the Underline and learning about what I call ecological horticulture,” program leader Asha Bertsch told Miami Today. “We select students from Miami Dade College in their first or second year who are interested in horticulture and they work with us through the summer for eight weeks and every day, learn different aspects of what it takes to manage our gardens here on the Underline.”

Since May 20, a handful of students in the Green Leaders program have been working five days a week to plant and maintain native flora while getting on-the-job training for a future career. They’re currently working between phase one and phase two of the project, which runs from the Miami River down to Southwest 19th Avenue.

This session of the paid internship will finish on July 11, but program leaders say it will continue as work on the Underline progresses further south.

“Different from a typical landscaping crew, it’s very ecologically minded. It’s not just learning how to trim and edge and prune accordingly. It’s really taking the environment into consideration and what we’re trying to do is create this 10-mile ecological corridor so that we’re providing habitat and creating a space that’s improving the environment,” Ms. Bertsch explained.

The Green Leaders focus is on planting native species to foster a friendly environment for pollinators, birds and the various insects that find a home in Miami so they are welcomed in the linear park in addition to incorporating natural grading and bioswales to capture rain runoff so it doesn’t flood into the streets.

“Across the city and country, development is decreasing the habitat for a lot of our native species, especially our more sensitive ones. Pollinators and insects across the board are in decline. We’re having regular heat advisories and constant flooding. It’s our mission to create a garden that is combating all of these new challenges that we’re facing with climate change and creating a skilled workforce so that we have a team within our organization but also so that they’re developing a skill set that can take them into other parts of Miami to work on similar projects,” said Ms. Bertsch.

On a mission to create workforce development programs that focus on training local residents, Bank of America Miami is supporting the Green Leaders in its second year with a $75,000 grant. The Daly Family Fund also contributed $50,000 to support the program.

“There’s going to be a great need for this kind of training because there’s a lot of other organizations that have the same issues the Underline has and it could become a training ground for the other 100-some projects similar to the Underline going on across the United States,” John Daly said.

Two students who took part in last year’s program have now been hired by The Underline to continue their work. One of them, Daniel Arrubla, graduated Miami Dade College just a few weeks ago and is working toward additional certifications to build on his experience.

“My experience in the program was really helpful in my career. I found that the Underline was reinforcing everything I was learning at Miami Dade College while I was doing the Horticulture and Landscape program,” Mr. Arrubla said. “It’s important to have this type of apprenticeship programs that are aiming to upskill gardeners and expand their capabilities and open a wide range of opportunity for us.”

As Mr. Arrubla continues working with the Underline, he says the idea is to introduce more native species to the park and at some point, create a larger tree canopy to help to cool down temperatures.

As a testament of the initiative’s success, both Mr. Arrubla and Bank of America’s Vania Laguerre were invited at the end of June to the national City Parks Alliance conference in Seattle, where they took part in a panel discussion showcasing the Green Leaders program.

“It was my first time going to a conference. It was over 1,000 people. I got to learn a lot about the parks and recreations world, which is huge,” Mr. Arrubla said. “I had the opportunity to explain a little bit of what we’re doing here in Miami and I also learned a lot from other organizations and about the wide range of opportunities in this industry.”

“The interest that this work is going to continue to elicit on a broader scale nationally, I saw that in the time that I got to spend at the conference in Seattle,” Ms. Laguerre said. “The number of organizations that are having to address the sustainability of the environment and then realizing that there’s so many shortcomings in terms of being able to track information … really puts the work that the Underline is doing at the forefront.”