Community Advisory Committee
Join us! The Stewarding Canopy and Community in Central Queens (SCCCQ) Project has a Community Advisory Committee to support the longevity of the project. We are seeking active community leaders with an interest in civic engagement who reside within the project area. Members of the committee are tasked with ensuring their neighborhood’s urban forestry needs are heard and addressed and attending quarterly committee meetings.
Are you a leader in your community interested in becoming a member of the committee?
Fill out the Interest Form for more information. Also accessible here: https://forms.office.com/g/YCvDbiXfrU
Meet our members
Len Maniace
Jackson Heights Beautification Group
JHBG Website
Len’s led the Jackson Heights Beautification Group’s Tree LC program since 2012, watching it grow from a few volunteers occasionally caring for street-trees to a volunteer team of dozens working year-round.
This fixation with trees dates back to childhood. At 12, Len spent several weeks at a scout camp near Narrowsburg where the scouts witnessed the mystical power of trees—though they didn’t call it that. He learned to identify trees: sugar maples, white pines, pin oaks, and the left-, right-, and no- handed mittens of sassafras trees. For better or worse, it was sign of things to come.
Working for an environmental organization after college, Len encouraged city school children to become tree huggers, literally; on his tree-care walks, students wrapped their arms around London Planes and Norway maples.
As a daily journalist, Len’s fixation with trees continued. Much of his career was as a science and environmental writer. Among his stories: accompanying Columbia University researchers to an ancient, craggy wood near New Paltz where they took pencil-thin, tree-core samples that unlocked centuries-old records of drought and other weather perturbations.
After moving with his wife Barbara to Jackson Heights, where they raised two sons, Len learned the neighborhood lacked parks, setting the seed for Tree LC. If Jackson Heights lacked parkland, the idea was to create greenspace elsewhere—help the trees we had thrive and plant many more. Jackson Heights embraced the plan. Tree LC has been the city’s most active tree-stewardship group since 2021.
A board member and former president of JHBG, Len encouraged the nonprofit in 2019 to join an effort that would become Forest for All NYC. The 180-member coalition led the push to make it city policy to increase the city’s tree canopy to 30 percent. Len is a member of its leadership team.
Marta Schlitzer
Jackson Heights Beautification Group
JHBG Website
Marta just celebrated 40 years here in NYC, where she works in design and loves to make thoughtful and beautiful things.
She purchased her co-op in Jackson Heights in 2019 and wanted to invest in her gorgeous neighborhood. During the covid-19 pandemic, she found Jackson Heights Beautification Group Tree LC. It was, and still is, an amazing opportunity to care for public spaces and meet like-minded neighbors. She has become the right-hand to JHBG leadership, boosting the organization’s visibility through branding and social media outreach, as well as note keeping and wrangling volunteers. Marta has been inspired watching the number of volunteers and area of care grow over the past 4 years.
Through JHBG, she was also introduced to more NYC Parks activities and opportunities to work on environmental projects. She is now a NYC Parks Care Captain who spearheads Tree LC events, getting mulch trucks to come to the neighborhood, focusing on areas of extra need. She trained to become a Trees NY certified Citizen Pruner in 2023 and prunes our street trees with JHBG Tree LC all winter. She also joined as a DEP Rain Garden Steward to care for a few rain gardens in her area.
She is a Sanitation Foundation Trash Academy graduate, which helps her lead her co-op recycling and compost education. She has also become a part-time Sanitation Foundation CSA, working with volunteers for cleanups around the City.
She is looking forward to many more years of helping to make our city greener and clean through these amazing organizations!