Boston, MA
Kickstarting A Youth-Centered Green Economy For The Environmental Justice Community Of East Boston
Organization: Eastie Farm
Primary Investigator: Kannan Thiruvengadam
Research Track: Climate & Environmental Resilience
1-2-Green!
East Boston is an immigrant-majority Environmental Justice Community with diminished resiliency due to economic inequities. Eastie Farm is a grassroots organization that fosters equitable local food systems, regenerative land use, and environmental stewardship. We envision a local and easily accessible green workforce development program for youth – a natural progression of our current work with K-12 schools and our creation of green jobs and climate solutions, such as our zero-emission greenhouse.
This pilot involves both biological and social science research, with ecosocial community benefits built in. Youth will be paid to assist experts in identifying and implementing green infrastructure solutions that increase coastal resiliency, ways to remove barriers to green jobs, and ways to increase community adoption of beneficial ecosocial programs. As they learn research methods and green job skills, youth will see how their work directly benefits their own community. Northeastern University, the City of Boston, M.I.T., East Boston Community Development Corporation, and The Emerald Tutu will work with Eastie Farm using a multi-channel, multilingual approach to ensure inclusive community engagement throughout the pilot. Our CIVIC pilot will be a model for 21st century resilience for communities like ours.
NSF Abstract
This research involves understanding how underserved communities get actively engaged in making the transition to a vibrant green economy with improved environmental conditions and community resilience to climate change. To accomplish this goal, the research engages local youth in constructive and productive activities involving urban farming, coastal restoration, and social science-driven community engagement via a non-profit community entity (Eastie Farm). Youth centered activities include financial support to help youth make a living while they learn urban agricultural science and implementation via experimenting, documenting, and examining the best means and species of plants for local coastal wetland restoration that is designed to reduce coastal flooding and remobilization of industrial pollutants in wetland soils at the verge of their community. Youth-driven community surveys, overseen by university social science teams, and data collection and its analysis help youth learn how they can make positive and major differences in their community. University researchers, community members, and the community-based Eastie Farm are working together on this pilot to understand how low income and environmentally impacted communities can meet the challenges of climate change through nature-based solutions. Broader impacts of the project include youth empowerment and mentoring, focused on developing a robust understanding of how to make communities resilient to climate change and improve resident's quality of life. It creates a model that can be scaled and translated to other low-income, environmentally compromised, urban, coastal communities. The project also provides youth in low-income, traditionally underserved, urban communities with expertise and training in green careers as well as learning and realization of the power of youth-driven actions that have the potential to change a community and improve the lives of its residents.
The CIVIC Innovation Challenge is a collaboration with Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation. Through the Eastie's Farm pilot program, youth are actively engaged in and learn social, climate, and biological science. In this project, 40 youth in a low income community in East Boston will be engaged in a program focused on building a green future for themselves and their community by learning green job skills; proper plant identification, selection, propagation, and installation; the amending and monitoring of environmental conditions to minimize and mitigate coastal flooding and the transport of industrial pollutants in marine wetlands while working closely with scientists and experts in bioscience and social science. They will also collect and analyze data on the barriers that keep families in their community from adopting approaches that help mitigate and provide resilience to climate change impacts and that are beneficial, both ecologically and economically, to themselves and their communities. In addition, the program exposes youth to experiential activities that help them understand the power of the scientific process and how to develop an entrepreneurial mind-set by involving them in experimentation and installation trials. The program includes field trips to talk to and interact with experts in the green energy and economy. Additional program impacts include connection of involved youth with providers of green jobs, from agriculture to solar and energy audits to jobs in education and green finance; all of which can help them kickstart a green economy in their own community, laying a pathway for a better sustainable future.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.