You may know that East New York is a Brooklyn neighborhood on which decades of economic neglect and disinvestment have taken their toll. It’s a food desert, to start, and there’s a real lack of green space in its communities. But did you also know that the last 10-15 years have brought a mighty wave of community investment back to East New York’s streets? As gentrification hits Brooklyn harder and harder, non-profits and neighbor-driven initiatives are working to bring East New York back to its roots, and especially to the urban community gardening that played such a big role in its history.
[Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy]
The future in their hands
Miguel Cruz knows; he grew up in East New York, attends The Academy for Conservation and the Environment, in Brooklyn, and this past summer was accepted to work as a LEAF (Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future) fellow with The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
“Miguel is one of our students who suffers from asthma, and is just really conscious of his immediate environment. He has physical reactions when the environment is not a healthy place for him to be in,” explains Blaze Jones-Yellin, LEAF Eastern U.S. Coordinator. Since 1995, LEAF each summer has sent about 150 high school students like Cruz, from all over the country (New York sends about 50), out into national parks and wild spaces, to learn and to work in conservation.
“They leave home, they leave the city, they go out and spend four weeks of the summer living, working and playing on nature preserves in over 35 states around the country, and for many of them it’s their first real immersive experience in nature, it’s their first paid job, it’s their first time away from home. So for many of them it’s a transformative experience,” says Jones-Yellin. “They often come back with new enthusiasm and new motivation to get involved in conservation projects in their communities.”
[Photo by Karine Aigner]
Cruz and a cohort of nine other die-hard NYC-area 2015 LEAF graduates have come together to form the inaugural LEAF Ambassadors; their summer experiences in the Florida Everglades, the Adirondacks, the prairies of Illinois and beyond got them hooked. They’re back home in the city, now, but they’re not quitting! They travel around the city after school and on weekends, attending sustainability-related conferences (the GrowTogether conference in the Bronx, most recently) and volunteering in communities. Many of them see environmental sustainability careers in their futures, whether in teaching, engineering, green architecture, or city planning.
Which is exactly what The Nature Conservancy hopes for; the organization last year initiated a major push to reach out to youth, and especially to urban populations. “This group is representative of those really stellar super star interns who came back and were so empowered and motivated from their summer experiences that they wanted to stay involved during the school year,” says Jones-Yellin. If the model is successful, TNC plans to expand the program to other cities in years to come.
[Photo by Karine Aigner]
Not just an empty lot
How often do you pass a run-down, overgrown, empty city lot, and actually consider the potential value of that space to the surrounding community? Jones-Yellin and the NYC LEAF Ambassadors have done just that; in seeking out a next high-impact volunteer project, they settled on an abandoned former community garden near Miguel’s house – the Warwick Street Community Garden – and can’t wait to “reactivate” it. For neighbors who haven’t yet envisioned the potential of the vacant lot, seeing will be believing! That kind of quick, short-term reimagining of long-term change is called tactical urbanism, and we see it working magic around the country, every day.
The LEAF Ambassadors are also getting a crash course in community partnering; they’re teaming up with awesome groups like the New York City Community Gardens Coalition , Green Thumb, 596 Acres, GrowNYC, and East New York Farms.
“It’s a neighborhood that you can hold up as an example of the power that people can have over their own surroundings, and the difference that residents can make in their own communities,” says Jones-Yellin of East New York, “which is something you don’t see all that often in New York. East New York is a shining example of a community that has taken back its own space.”
[Photo courtesy The Nature Conservancy]
How you can help
To learn more, and to donate, visit the team’s ioby campaign page here. Donations will go towards tools and materials, outreach to neighbor-volunteers, and organization of a community work day in May.
Feeling inspired? Want to take action in YOUR neighborhood? If you have awesome ideas about how to make your town greener, safer, and more fun, let us help! Tell us your awesome idea right here. We’d love to help you get started today.
Pssst…. In OTHER ioby news: Want help bring books to the people who can’t make it in to a library? How about this awesome ioby leader, who’s outfitting her new bookmobile in New Orleans, so that she can bring free books to even more kids in her 9th Ward neighborhood? Watch the video, and get ready to reminisce about your favorite kids’ books – this ioby hero’s enthusiasm is contagious.