Unique internship at Green-Wood Cemetery trains students for careers in construction, preservation and masonry
NEW YORK - Young people are learning about historic preservation at a Brooklyn cemetery thanks to a new program.
There are hundreds of thousands of stories to be told in the iconic, 185-year-old Green-Wood Cemetery, where more than half a million people are memorialized, loved and remembered.
Preserving those memorials is the job of Neela Wickremesinghe, Green-Wood's Director of Restoration and Preservation.
"Historic preservation is the lens through which I see the whole world," she tells CBS2's Hannah Kliger.
The 478-acre bucolic institution, with its rolling landscapes and flowering fields, is also an active work site. This spring, a dozen students are pressure washing, scrubbing and repointing old mortar from the 1853 Delafield burial mausoleum.
"I really like the, no pun intended, like the concreteness of it. The more stable unions, the more stable job flow. So that's what really made it more appealing than some more maybe abstract creative jobs," explained 25-year-old Ani Kumin, from Park Slope.
She is one of a cohort of students enrolled in a unique internship program, called Bridge to Crafts Careers. It's a joint venture between the cemetery, The World Monuments Fund and Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, a youth workforce training organization.
"We did a ton of training classes and we spent a week on a training wall before we were allowed to even touch the monument, to make sure we all knew what we were doing," says Jared Largo, a 21-year-old student, also from Park Slope.
During these 10 weeks, the students get real-world experience, they also get OSHA certification and are even getting paid. The goal is for them to be ready for entry level jobs in masonry, restoration and construction the day the program ends.
"Construction can be one of those tricky sectors that if you don't have a family member in the business, you might not know how to proceed. So this allows folks from all different types of backgrounds to get a good primer within the sector to figure out what they have to do, what kind of certifications they need," Wickremesinghe says.
The interns come from a variety of backgrounds, most with no experience in masonry. But all felt like it allowed them an opportunity when they otherwise wouldn't have one.
"Things are moving more towards digital, A.I. and social media," says 26-year-old Travis Basora, from Flatbush. "But I feel like the hands-on skills are really dying in a way, especially for my age group and people like there in my community... I feel like those are careers that are really important."
Between the sounds of powertools and the spring shimmer of the cemetery's iconic glacial pond, these interns are hard at work preserving the city's past and creating their own future.
The program is for students ages 18-27. It runs through May 26th, and recruitment for the new class will open in January 2024.
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