Meet Laura. Laura Pehmoeller leads the Blue Skies Landscaping crew as they work throughout Milwaukee to maintain the city’s growing portfolio of green stormwater infrastructure.

Joining Blue Skies, a division of the nonprofit Walnut Way based in Milwaukee’s Lindsay Heights neighborhood, just before the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in 2020, Laura leads a crew of young men in handling a variety of landscaping projects.

So-called “green infrastructure” offers myriad benefits not conferred by “gray infrastructure” projects—plants soak up and filter water and produce oxygen, cooling, shade, and beautiful habitat, for instance—but they still require care and attention to maintain function. This includes weeding, mowing, and other landscaping. Maintaining green infrastructure also takes learning how it is designed to function and about native plants used that may have specific needs.

Laura’s Blue Skies crews have built up this local experience and expertise.

They maintain City of Milwaukee bioswales (vegetated ditches found in median strips, boulevards, and other public rights-of-way). They helped install an underground cistern, bioswale, and native plantings at Fondy Farmers Market, Ezekiel Gillespie Park, and Cream City Farms. They also maintain vegetation in three large Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District stormwater basins in the 30th Street Corridor. Laura says they also take care of several residential properties. It all adds up to improving our water quality and showing that there are job pathways for those willing to work hard.

With a background working in greenhouse operations, Laura enjoys working outside with her hands in the earth. “I don’t really know where the inspiration comes from. But, like, for me, just being outside and working outside with plants, trees, whatever it's calming,” she says. “I love doing it.”

She says it is also rewarding seeing the results of your labor. “I guess part of it, too, is just the transformation. Even if you’re at the same site, every day it’s something different.”

Offering steady employment to young men of color with opportunities for advancement, Walnut Way’s Blue Skies Landscaping program is a major local model in the effort to boostrap “blue/green” jobs for Milwaukeeans—and ultimately to seed the market for more contractors to take on green infrastructure projects that employ folks with transferrable skills. “We’re just trying to build people up into the workforce, and either they stay with us or they move on,” Laura says.