We are working on a range of environmental concerns from an environmental justice perspective.
So we're working on water and air and solid waste and all of those usual environmental
issues that affect all of us, but we have a perspective that is a little different.
We value the fact that communities speak for themselves and in order for them to speak
for themselves we have to provide the tools and resources to work with them to do that.
Certainly climate change is critical to our communities.
Those communities, low income communities of color, are going to be the first hit and
the hardest hit.
Those are residents who are least able to adapt and so how do we begin to build in protections?
How do we make sure that the burden of increased energy prices, increased food and fuel prices
does not fall on those least able to bear that burden?
Community residents are experts on their community and they are the ones you need to go to to
understand what's going on in those neighborhoods and what some of those solutions can be.
The phenomenon we referred to was environmental racism where people saw environmental decision
making as another aspect of bias that was hurting their communities.
Cities like Harlem and East Harlem are three to five times higher in asthma incidents than
other neighborhoods and we believe that there are reasons for that and some of the reasons
is the disparate pollution burden.
It's not simply enough to be the watchdog who stops a bad project but we have to have
a vision, we have to organize residents around their vision and then we must articulate that
to our elected officials and to our city and we felt when we do that that we can win.
We were in an eight year organizing campaign against the North River sewage treatment
plant.
We were able through our lawsuit to get the city and the state to commit to a five year
agreement to fix the plant and so that was our first real victory to get that brand new
plant totally retrofitted so that it was not making people in this community sick.
Harlem Pier is a 125th street, will open in a few weeks and that's been a ten year project
since we first had a community charrette to talk about that and it's a wonderful victory.
When I go by there now and see green grass, trees, piers, it's just wonderful.
Jane Jacobs' work and her body of work is an incredible roadmap for so many of us.
We are a city of neighborhoods.
Each new culture comes in with different needs, desires, ways of living in the environment
and the idea that it's all right for a neighborhood to figure out how to adjust to that new culture
and new vibrancy and how we can embrace it and enhance neighborhood life is certainly
a legacy that she has left for me.
She really almost gave you permission to work at a neighborhood level and to show that that
was valued.
You can make absolutely a difference, I mean one person can make a real difference.
You just have to understand what your talents and skills are, identify the problem or concern
you have that you're committed to and you can begin to make a difference on that.
I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s and experienced the Bronx during a time that
the rest of the city and the world kind of knew about and understood as the burning of
the Bronx.
I understood it from the eyes of a child.
I remember I grew up on the ninth floor.
We woke up and basically spent the day to the sounds of fire engines and sirens.
I remember that kind of accurate sort of taste of smoke in my throat and in many ways lived
a while where this place was not the place that I loved, this was the place that I feared.
The rest of the world would measure my success as a brown woman who grew up poor by how far
I could escape from this reality.
I took a long journey sort of and a detour away from community and I began to understand
that for all of my individual success my family wasn't any better for that, my community wasn't
any better for that.
And so for lots of reasons I really felt the call to come back home.
And I began to do some work at my local parish.
Sixty-five thousand people live in less than a square mile, fifteen thousand of them are
under the age of eighteen and there are no youth serving organizations in this neighborhood.
The only place for people like me was our church youth group.
Youth Ministries was really born out of that experience.
A fundamental principle of environmental justice is self-determination.
We're not looking for people to give us things.
In the end that perpetuates a cycle of disempowerment.
What we're looking is to be respected as engaged citizens of this city in determining
what is best for ourselves, for our future, in partnership with policy makers and agency
heads and elected officials.
The story of the Bronx River began with a group of young people taking a drive up the
Bronx River Parkway.
And driving not ten minutes north of here and seeing how extraordinarily beautiful and
accessible the river was there.
And the simple question that they asked themselves was why is it not like this in our neighborhood.
And we met with the Parks Department planners and we said this is what we want in a park.
This is what we want to see.
I could see the waterfront.
I could see the access.
The young people could see the greenways and the skateboarding areas.
They could see it.
They could feel it.
They could taste it.
The powerful part of that process was sitting down and participating.
I think the work of Jane Jacobs, while it changed in some ways decisions around the
infrastructure of this city, I think it also fundamentally changed how people, those with
the voice and those considered without a voice, thought about themselves as participants
in the decision making processes of the city.
And for that, I feel so very proud to in any way be likened to her.
The legacy that I want to leave is a legacy of power.
And that is how do people who grew up like the little girl that I once was believing
that bad stuff just happens and that we have absolutely no say in it.
How do we shift that to create a generation of young people and community residents starting
with my own children that believe in their own power and believe that they have something
to say that they have an influence in their community, that they have an influence on
public policy, and they have the right and the responsibility to determine the conditions
of their own lives.
