Founded in 1996, the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association (THJCA) was created to give young people in Tampa’s oldest suburb the tools and confidence to succeed. Nearly three decades later, that mission is more urgent than ever. Gentrification has driven up rents and scattered the community’s majority-Black families across Hillsborough County, severing ties that once bound neighbors together. THJCA counters that displacement with free enrichment in academics, arts, entrepreneurship, nutrition, and civic leadership. In the community garden, youth plant and harvest organic produce — “with this little seed they plant, we show them the path it produces,” says founder Lena Young Green — learning responsibility, patience, and pride in their work. Former executive director and current consultant Naya Young is modeling those lessons by running for Tampa City Council, District 5. As Green explains: “She is demonstrating to our children and youth how important and significant civic engagement and community leadership are.”
Lena Young Green, THJCO founder, shows visitors around the Tampa Heights Community Garden. Once a vacant lot, it is now a thriving spot growing produce, flowers, and community.
Source: Harriet Festing
The nonprofit is powered by seven staff and 11 long-serving board members who remain deeply rooted in the Tampa Heights community. Its home is a landmark 1906 Gothic church, long abandoned until the association persuaded the Florida Department of Transportation to sublease it, that now thrives as a hub of opportunity. Within its walls, children gather in a computer lab for tutoring, learn healthy cooking in the kitchen, perform on the stage of a 300-seat auditorium, and tend vegetables in the surrounding community garden. Programs span afterschool care, summer camps, mentorship, therapy, college tours, fashion shows where students design and model their own clothes, business competitions where they pitch original ideas, and the city’s largest youth-led Juneteenth celebration. Even as families are scattered across 38 schools countywide, THJCA provides fertile ground for connection, ensuring that each seed planted grows into strong roots of creativity, leadership, and civic pride.
Caption: Children are an integral part of the Tampa Heights Community Garden, a signature initiative of the Tampa Heights Junior Civic Association, started in 2011. It has been twice named best community garden in Florida by the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs and tied for best community garden in the Deep South region of the National Garden Club. Source: https://www.thjca.org/