Our youth green livelihoods track exists to turn volunteering into something with real, ongoing value for the young people who take part, not just a line on a CV but an actual skill set that leads somewhere. We asked three participants who've gone furthest along that path to describe, in their own words, what it actually looked like from where they started.
Starting in the nursery, staying for the responsibility
One participant joined the youth nursery team originally just to help out during a school holiday, with no particular plan beyond that. What kept them involved, by their own account, was the responsibility that came with the role once they'd shown consistency, being trusted to judge on their own when a batch of seedlings was ready for hardening off, a judgment call that took real repetition to get comfortable making confidently. That kind of trust, extended gradually as competence grew, is something we've come to see as central to why the nursery team retains people rather than seeing volunteers drift away after an initial burst of interest.
They now lead training for newer nursery volunteers themselves, a natural progression that's become fairly typical: experienced team members mentoring the next intake, which has meant the nursery's institutional knowledge doesn't depend entirely on any one person staying involved indefinitely.
From planting days to paid landscaping work
A second participant came to us initially through community planting days rather than the nursery, drawn in by a friend who was already volunteering. Over roughly a year of regular involvement, they moved through our landscaping training track, learning correct planting technique, seasonal pruning and basic compound design, eventually taking on supervised paid work for an estate that had approached us for landscaping help.
That first paid job led to a second with a different household, and by their own description it's become a fairly steady source of income, several ongoing maintenance arrangements rather than one-off jobs. They credit the structured progression, starting on our own sites before moving to supervised paid work, with giving them confidence they wouldn't have had going directly into paid landscaping work without that groundwork first.
Turning a school holiday camp into a longer path
The third participant's path started even earlier, as a child attending one of our school-holiday environmental camps years before formally joining the youth nursery team as a teenager. That early exposure, hands-on time with seedlings and a planting session during the camp itself, is part of why we've continued investing in the camp despite the extra logistics it demands each holiday: it's produced at least this one clear example of a pathway from a single holiday activity through to sustained, skilled involvement years later.
They're now among the more experienced members of the nursery team and have started exploring the landscaping track as a next step, following the same progression the second participant described.
What these stories have in common
None of these three started with a plan to build a green livelihood, each began with a fairly casual first step, a school holiday, a friend's invitation, a nursery task during a break, and stayed because the responsibility and skill-building that followed felt genuinely worthwhile rather than like ongoing volunteer obligation. That's the pattern we're trying to build more of deliberately through the formal structure we've put around the youth green livelihoods track over the past year.
If you're a young Donholm resident curious what a similar path might look like for you, the easiest way in is usually the same as it was for all three of these participants: a single planting day, clean-up, or nursery session. Details are on our Get Involved page.
What we're doing to support more stories like these
These three stories aren't isolated outcomes we happened to notice after the fact, they're increasingly the product of a deliberate structure we've built around the youth green livelihoods track over the past year: a clear progression from initial volunteering, through skills training on our own sites, to supervised paid work with an estate or household partner. That structure didn't exist when the first of these three participants started out, which means their paths involved more improvisation and informal mentorship than the more defined track available to participants joining today.
We're tracking outcomes for the current cohort more formally than we did in the past, partly to understand which parts of the progression matter most for turning volunteering into paid work, and partly so we can report honestly to partners and funders on what the programme is actually achieving, not just anecdotally through stories like these three, but across the fuller group of participants moving through the track.
We're also conscious that three stories, however genuine, aren't the same as a full programme evaluation, and we don't want to overstate what they represent. Not every participant who joins the youth nursery team or a planting day goes on to paid work, and that's fine, plenty of volunteers contribute meaningfully without ever seeking that outcome. What these three stories do show is that the pathway exists and works for those who want to pursue it, which is precisely what the formal structure we've built around the track over the past year is meant to make more consistently available.