Bronson ’25 spends Saturday mornings dedicating his time to cleaning up a local park in his community.
Large cities, such as New York City, are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Parks play an important role in helping to relieve some of the stress of the heatwave caused by climate change. Long extreme weather events, like the heat dome of 2024, put stress on our parks causing an increase in usage, which overruns our systems for collecting garbage, providing cooling, and maintaining parks. Volunteer organizations like Jerome Park and Friends play a huge role in keeping our parks clean, safe, and beautiful. They help bring precious resources that are being drained away as the city and state deal with crises caused by extreme weather and other emergencies.
Jerome Park and Friends, the organization that I am volunteering with this summer, cares for the horticultural areas as well as the general maintenance of Fort Independence Park and Playground around the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx. It is a park that is heavily utilized by its surrounding community, which includes dozens of tall apartment buildings, three large high schools and a city college. This park is a literal oasis in an urban environment. It provides shade and fresh air to older adults, preschoolers, and other vulnerable populations who are not able to control heating and cooling in their own apartments.
These past few weeks, I’ve been working with Jerome Park and Friends and we’ve dedicated our Saturday Mornings to cleaning up Fort Independence Park. This is really important and personal as I have been going to this park since I was a child. As part of Jerome Park and Friends we meet every Saturday from roughly 9am-12pm. So far we’ve been focusing on doing work near the entrance of the park. It’s always great to see people in the local community come out and help us and/or speak with us about our cause and what we’re doing. These past few weeks we’ve been focused on maintaining the Northwest side of the park. Some of the work that I’ve done thus far includes shoveling pathways that have been covered with dirt from storms, removing weeds and dead leaves off of flower beds, as well as removing staff vines off of fences and trees, which are invasive. One part of this project that has been greatly rewarding to me so far has been when the locals in the neighborhood stop to thank us or talk about our cause and how helpful we are. Every week the park looks nicer and nicer, and that is something I’ve found that has made my work so fulfilling. While doing any service has its benefits, being able to see the direct product of our contributions has been deeply rewarding.
