The Tampa Heights Junior Civic Organization sets young people up for success through free education and enrichment opportunities in the arts, math and science, nutrition, entrepreneurship, and other core skills. THJCR was founded in 1996 as a way for kids to become civically engaged, and in nearly 30 years, it has supported thousands of underserved children and teens with afterschool programming, summer camps, mentorship, behavioral therapy and college tours. THJCR hosts fashion shows where students design and model their own outfits and competitions where they pitch their own businesses. The organization also operates a farmers market stall where students sell organic produce that they grew personally in the community garden — “with this little seed they plant, we show them the path it produces,” says founder Lena Young Green — and hosts an annual Juneteenth celebration to teach its students their history and expose them to the arts, entertainment and business communities.
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 has seven staff members, along with 11 long-serving board members integral to the Tampa Heights community. The THJCR office is a renovated Gothic church that was built in 1906 and long abandoned until the organization successfully convinced the owner, the Florida Department of Transportation, to sublease the building. It houses the community garden, a kitchen, a computer lab, and a 300-seat auditorium, serving as a central gathering place for kids now living in disparate parts of Tampa. In recent years, Tampa Heights, the oldest suburb of Tampa, has been gentrifying, with high rents pushing out and scattering the community’s majority-Black residents and scattering them. In 2020, Young Green said, participating students were attending seven different schools, but just two years later, those same students were attending 38 schools throughout Hillsborough County—making it more difficult for THJCR to build long-term relationships with students who need it the most.
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/