Through support from H-E-B, EarthShare Texas hosts the Green Leaders Fellowship each spring: a program designed to cultivate emerging environmental professionals through hands-on experience, strategic mentorship, and mission-driven placements across the state.
This blog series highlights the work of our Green Leaders Fellows, showcasing the research, storytelling, and advocacy they contributed to their individual host organizations. From policy analysis to community engagement, each fellow brought a unique lens to the environmental challenges facing Texas today.
Fellow Spotlight: Johnathan Sicard
Host Organization: Keep Texas Beautiful
Focus Area: Data Analytics
Cohort: 2025
Before starting his fellowship, Johnathan was studying mechanical engineering at University of Texas, Austin.
He had already completed an internship in the chemicals industry. While it gave Johnathan valuable work experience, he was excited to try something with a stronger environmental focus and the Green Leaders Fellowship was the perfect opportunity to jump in.
The Fellowship Project
Johnathan spent his fellowship growing the Keep Texas Recycling program, which is still run by Keep Texas Beautiful. Keep Texas Recycling provides access to recycling services to underserved and rural communities across the state.
Keep Texas Recycling Impact:
2.7M Trees Saved
$12.3M in revenue for member communities
$5.8M saved in extra landfill costs
Keep Texas Recycling helps communities without municipal facilities navigate the logistics of recycling. Here’s how it works: partner organizations offer sites to centralize specific items for recycling. For instance, one partner org may offer space to gather tires. In return, Keep Texas Beautiful staff manage the logistics for transporting those items to recycling centers. While transporting large amounts of material is costly, the communities served often get a financial benefit from participating. Selling the recycled materials generates revenue and reduces their reliance on costly landfills.
To learn from past successes, Johnathan surveyed top-performing partners to understand what made them so successful. He reported on what he learned at a Keep Texas Beautiful symposium, where he was able to network with green workers from around Texas.
Another way Johnathan helped grow the program was by researching and interviewing prospects who could join in the future. Using what he learned, he created a list of 12 municipalities around Texas that would be good candidates to join Keep Texas Recycling.
“I would absolutely recommend the Green Leaders Fellowship program. For me it was a way to transition out of the chemicals industry. I know for a lot of others in the cohort, it was also an opportunity to get a foot in the environmental world.”
After the Fellowship
Johnathan’s focus on environmental work continued after completing his fellowship. He’s now in grad school studying civil engineering and he’s completed two engineering-focused internships. One internship was at Ørsted, a company specializing in offshore wind and renewable energy. Johnathan’s fellowship experience helped him get a foot in the door. They appreciated that he’s an engineer with solid communication skills to boot.
“The fellowship gave me experience taking a very technical topic and boiling it down so someone not well-versed could understand it too. Answering peoples’ questions on the fly was good training. We don’t have curricula around day-to-day communications in engineering school but we should.”
What’s Next?
Johnathan hopes that after grad school he can continue some of the research he’s doing on how we can better integrate solar power with environmental restoration. Johnathan has observed how we can make solar farms more biodiverse and safer from extreme flooding events by planting them with diverse native seeds. As the variety of native plants compete with each other, they grow deeper roots which can absorb more water during heavy rainfall than the shallow root systems you might find in a monoculture grass lawn.
After grad school, Johnathan is looking ahead to a career in clean energy. Any research that can make clean energy more economically efficient or less environmentally disruptive will make the transition away from fossil fuels that much more compelling. We’re rooting for you Johnathan!
To learn more about the Green Leaders Fellowship, visit earthshare-texas.org/earthshare-texas-fellowship.
