Chris Pack: Crew Chief at the Front Lines of Climate Change

Meet Chris. Chris Pack has worked with Cream City Conservation Corps (also known as “C4”) since March 2021 as a crew leader running a pilot program that trains new workers in green infrastructure maintenance.

Supported by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), the workforce program is called Fresh Coast, Fresh Start. Funded for three years into 2024, it’s designed for adult “opportunity candidates,” described by MMSD as “including reentering citizens, unemployed, underemployed, and career-changing adults.” Pack and his crew work at Milwaukee County Parks and other sites—including Green Tech Station—to go in and maintain green infrastructure features. This involves significant outdoor manual labor, the ability to identify and remove invasive plant species, and working knowledge of how different green infrastructure features are designed to function so they can be remedied if there’s a problem.

The skills and experience involved are intended to grow the workforce of skilled laborers among racial and demographic groups underrepresented in this kind of work—important to build a more inclusive economy and a more equitable society in a truly “water-centric city.” That’s in addition to the critical importance of properly maintaining green infrastructure itself, which is important to slow the flow of urban stormwater in the face of the more extreme storms experienced and expected with climate change.

“A lot of what we do is invasives removal from these features to keep them functioning properly,” Chris says. “They're learning a lot about stormwater management throughout this process with the end result of hopefully getting some job skills and getting them hired on with some Milwaukee County Parks and some expertise that might be missing within the parks system for managing the green infrastructure features.”