SEED Skills Crew

SEED Skills Crew is an opportunity for youth ages 13-18 to sharpen their leadership, communication, and work skills through learning to manage an organic garden and delivering healthy and nutritious produce to surrounding communities.

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SEED Skills 2026 Registration Closed. Applications for 2027 will open in March.

What The SEED Skills Program Offers

Trellis for Tomorrow’s SEED Skills Crew is an “earn while you learn” program that challenges youth participants and their communities to think, interact, and grow in new ways.

This high-impact summer program offers youth participants ages 13-18 meaningful opportunities to build work-related skills while learning to manage organic gardens, engage in relationships and activities that enhance their social and emotional capacity, develop new understandings, and participate in the creation of youth-led enterprises that increase access to local, nutritious, and affordable food.

“This program improved my social skills and gave me a chance to meet new people while learning how to positively benefit the community!”
– SEED Participant

A dynamic combination of hands-on work, engaging activities, and developing life skills!

Hands-on Work

Youth participants gather in organic gardens established by Trellis within their own neighborhoods and communities, where they learn to grow, harvest, and distribute produce to others.

Workplace Preparedness

Participants develop transferable skills for future employment. It all starts with an interview, where Trellis staff get to know participants and learn more about their goals. During the program, we work on developing skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and project management.

Life Skills

Youth participants will develop important life skills such as learning how to prepare healthy meals and the benefits of a nutritious diet, incorporating mindfulness into their routines, and learning more about financial literacy to set them up for success as they look ahead to their future.

Take Root

March-May, September-November

Take Root is our spring and fall after school program that meets in each of our 4 youth-led gardens once a week. This program is reserved for young people who have completed at least one summer in the SEED Skills program. During Take Root, youth actively practice and refine the skills they learned over the summer as they maintain the gardens, harvest and stock produce stands, and participate in garden-based lessons and activities.

SEED

Summer

The SEED Skills Crew summer program takes place across four garden sites. Main components of the summer program include:

Gardening, nutrition and cooking demonstrations
Harvesting and distributing produce to the surrounding community
Developing workplace readiness skills
Team building, goal setting, and making new connections with participants and community leaders

Springboard

Year Round

Springboard is our Leadership Track for young people who have completed at least one summer with SEED Skills and have committed to growing into a leadership position within the program. Youth must apply and be interviewed to join Springboard. Members meet throughout the year with Trellis staff, both virtually and in person to:

Set personal growth goals
Contribute to designing the summer program
Learn how to deliver the program, with different roles being filled by each of the 4 leadership tiers.

Springboard consists of progressive tiers of learning and leadership levels for participating youth SEED Leaders – Leader in Training, Junior Team Leader, Senior Team Leader, and Junior Program Assistant. SEED Leaders actively contribute to the design and delivery of the program, with Junior Program Assistants earning seasonal positions as Trellis staff members to assist in delivering the SEED Skills program.

Pounds of organic produce grown by our SEED Skills crews

Young people have participated in the program since 2018

Young people are currently on our Leadership Track

Program Sites

Because of the localized focus of our work, priority is given to youth applicants from the communities surrounding the garden sites. SEED Skills Crew currently operates gardens in four locations:

Pottsgrove

The Pottsgrove garden is located within the Rolling Hills Apartment complex. The garden sits behind the community room, and has been growing thousands of pounds of produce each year since 2020, when Trellis first partnered with Better Tomorrows to establish the garden. With the equivalent of 68 raised beds, this garden produces lots of fresh produce which gets delivered back into the Rolling Hills community.

Phoenixville

The Phoenixville garden is located within Don Coppedge Village, just behind Franklin Commons. In the spring of 2020, Trellis partnered with Chester County Food Bank and Pennrose to create a youth cohort to help care for the otherwise underutilized garden space. That summer, the teens in the SEED Skills program more than doubled the size of the garden through establishing in-ground beds, and it’s been growing over 1,000 pounds of produce each year since then.

Pottstown

The Pottstown garden is Trellis’ eldest SEED garden, located in the heart of the Borough of Pottstown on the 700 block of Walnut St. The garden was started in 2018 as a result of a partnership between Trellis and Hobart’s Run – the community development arm of the Hill School. The garden recently underwent a large expansion and we look forward to being able to grow even more food for the surrounding community!

Spring City

The Spring City garden is located within Park Spring Apartments complex, behind the community room. The garden began as a small youth-run garden and has now expanded into a large community garden that SEED participants manage during the summer. Produce grown in this garden is distributed back to residents of Park Spring Apartments.