Black Cultural Center Internship

January / April

2010

The Savor the Earth Hydroponic Window Farm ProjectBy Monica Leslie

Introduction

Even with today’s economic decline, the United States population has grown to 307 million since the first settlers began to colonize the Americas (Google). Since the arrival of the first slave ship, the Sao Joao Bautista to the Americas in 1619, the African American population has grown to 4.4 million in 1860 right before the Civil War (Table 1, Heywood, and Thortnon). The black population in America rose to 10 million by the time blacks were first allowed to vote and by the civil right movement there were more than 18 million African Americans living in the United States (Table 1). In 2008 an estimated 41.1 million African American lived in the United States (Deshay). During the most recent economic recession from the year 2000 to 2008, the poverty rate rose from 11.3 in 2000 to 13.2 percent in 2003 (National Poverty Center). While African Americans are estimated to be only 12.3 percent of the population during that time, they represented 33.2 percent of the impoverished population in the United States even after almost a century of advocating for better civil rights (U.S. Census Bureau and StateHealthFacts.org).

Inequities in the distribution of income, educational opportunities and jobs have been problems in the African American communities since before they were first recognized as citizens in 1914. Even though the United States population continues to expand rapidly, economic disparity continues to plague areas with the highest concentrations of ethnic communities; including the Mississippi delta, “the black belt” in Alabama, borderlands near the Mexico border, Midwest inner city neighborhoods; like in Detroit, Flint Milwaukee and many more (Erickson 3-5). As more Americans continue to lose jobs, income and educational opportunities more Americans are beginning to understand what it means to struggle to make ends meet. According to the Bread for the World Institute, 3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger (Siddiqi). Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (Sider 176-179). This reform was intended to end the welfare entitlement for those who cycled on and off federal assistance and reduced the set tighter restrictions on welfare eligibility. During the 1990s Clinton was also one of the biggest advocates of sending American corporations overseas to conduct business (Encyclopedia of the New American Nation). As unskilled and manufacturing corporations began to cut jobs or move their operations to Mexico or overseas with the promise of lower labor costs and a higher return on their investments, the U6 projections of U.S. rate of those who were unemployed and have also given up looking for employment dropped briefly from 9.8% in the beginning of 1996 to 7.1% by the year 2000 (Portal Seven). It dramatically rose again from 7.3% as the effects of globalization and bad

foreign trade policy began to take its toll on the American economy to 17.3 % by the end of 2010. During this same span of time, African American unemployment fell from 14.2% in 1992 to 8.9% after the legislation passed as programs were made available to help this group and others living in poverty find jobs and educational training to be in compliance with the reforms (The White House Web Site). But after the September 11th attacks jump started the economic recession in 2001 the unemployment for many ethnic groups in the United States rose once again.

This means that without income and the means to provide even basic needs; it is very unlikely that any ethnicity living below the poverty threshold is guaranteed access to resources such as healthy food, ethnicity specific nutrition and basic economic education or even conservation practices that could help individual households reduce the amount of money spent that would create better economic security.

Thesis

Even though low income groups produce the lowest ecological footprints, cohort groups who fall below the poverty threshold would benefit in many ways from learning about sustainability practices because they demonstrate the largest need for these principles (Echo).

While some African Americans have learned little about the corporate “green movement” advertised in the media and its impact on the environment, if this cohort group had

Access to information about the income barriers and other economic factors that limit access to education;

o This leads to an identifiable avenue to generate mindful discussions about resource depletion, globalization and peak oil.

Identification of cultural misunderstandings that create the misconception that African American youth have no interest in sustainability

o Including the lack of identifiable leadershipo The xenophobic exclusion of low income cultures from participation in

sustainability initiatives due to the fear and mistrust of the interest of low income cultural groups (Erickson 3-5).

An understanding of more practical applications of sustainability including:o Why sustainability is relevant, how to research and facilitate dialogue

about pressing challenges o How the practices of sustainability and conservation could be used as a

tool for personal and community developmento Practical methods to teach innovation skills in their fields using

sustainability o How sustainability can be used to help students learn to conserve

resources so that they can better make ends meet More identifiable leaders teaching them about holistic health and sustainability An understanding of how sustainability principles are different from the “green

movement” and how they can be used to cultivate valuable job skills and future job security

Methods to make the topic more engaging

more African Americans and other Americans who live below the poverty threshold would be willing to embrace conservation practices and adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. Learning how to embrace sustainability and community agriculture would teach students a new perspective of their historical connections to agriculture and provide an outlet for a more healthy and sustainable quality of life (Ford).

Background

The idea for the project came from a community eco-design forum that featured the innovative work of Brita Riley. Riley created the first hydroponic window farm installation located in New York City in February of 2009 (Riley). Her objective was to teach those who lived in urban food deserts and worked in office buildings an affordable and easily maintainable way to grow their own food and personally involve them in issues related to agriculture and the environment. Food deserts are an area where large-scale supermarkets have abandoned--leaving the entire community with little or no access to affordable, quality food (Bullard). Riley created a community forum using social media in order to encourage other artists and gardening enthusiasts to develop their own versions of her hydroponic, soilless, gardening system. And she states that

The ultimate aim of the Windowfarms project, however, is not to create a perfected physical object or product. Rather, the most highly valued result is a rewarding experience with crowsdsourced innovation. We are interested in the participants’ experience as they design for their own microenvironments, share ideas, rediscover the power of their own capacity to innovate, and witness themselves playing an active role in the green revolution (Riley).

When Dr. Tashia Bradley the director of the Berea College Black Cultural Center asked if I would be interested in heading a similar community gardening project, I admitted to her that I did not know how to plant anything without killing it, and that this project I knew very little about would provide an interesting opportunity to explore the journey of other African Americans who had no knowledge of how to build and cultivate a garden. It was also an excellent opportunity to explore the cultural implications of the project on low income community. I wanted to better assess the validity of the claim made by Dr. John Wegner, the Chief Environmental Officer at Emory University back in 2008 who told me that through all of his community efforts to attempt incorporating sustainability projects in Atlanta’s black community that African Americans simply weren’t interested in sustainability. Was I, in fact, the only one?

Initially the plan was to create a manual about the health and economic benefits of indoor urban horticulture and to discuss how sustainability practices like this project could be used to boost economic development within the community. The goal was to overcome historical stigmas regarding the role of black in agriculture and to explore issues of food security, increase access to nutritious food and increase low income African American’s resilience to poverty (Moon). But because of the lack of authoritative African American voices in the field of

sustainability and the questionable credibility of some of my original sources, the project focus was redirected. Some of the claims for the Afro-centric liberation movement about why healthy food was scientifically, so important were invalidated once I discovered that some of the writers making the claims had very limited scientific knowledge. Others, such as Leonard Jeffries had also been critiqued as black supremacists (Peyser). Although I could find partial verification for my initial claims about the need for low alkaline cruciferous vegetables, like the kind grown for the installation which was unavailable to African Americans living in food deserts, piecing together the information buried in research abstracts would take considerably more time than allotted for the project (Tangpricha, Masterjohn and Lewis). While confirming the claims that the effects of melanin production upon the metabolism, vitamin d deficiencies and mental illness would be an important aid the Black Cultural Center in the nutritional objectives of the project, the validity of these arguments would be weakened without more extensive supporting evidence for claims that urban horticulture could provide a remedy for this real and critical need.

So the objective I believed would be more achievable was to instead explore the strength and weaknesses of how we communicate the importance of sustainability to the low income communities. This approach seemed like a more effective use of resources toward addressing a very real and disturbing problem. The redirection of this type of exploration made the project more interesting to my peers and also aligned better with the Black Cultural Center’s goals.

By using this project as a relational tool to get students to think more about the principles of sustainability, students can become more actively engaged in learning to understand more critical reasons for becoming more aware of sustainability and its benefits. Students also can begin to think more critically about how they themselves use these methods to facilitate dialogue and identify culturally relevant issues. The project can also be used to generate more interest in how sustainability can be used to provide educational accessibility and economic opportunities. The practical knowledge that this project incorporates is a great way to transform important components of sustainability into students’ everyday lives. It also teaches students how to be more innovative, learn to live healthier and develop their own solutions to encouraging a more engaging method of sustainability education. By giving students a visible learning style identify with, students can learn alternative hands on methods to relate to the material and they can better understand relevant problems and barrier of access toward their education about sustainability.

Key Issues & Objectives

Access to Education

The purpose of the hydroponic window farm project is to build a bridge to the African American students who fall within the low income poverty range. The DIY window farm installation located outside of the Black Cultural Center in the student organizational lounge will be used as a mechanism by the Black Cultural Center to engage student curiosity about the practice of affordable community resilience projects that are achievable and cost effective and that meet specific community needs. This installation specifically will be used to specifically address the exploration of increasing access to food security and proper nutrition and facilitating a dialogue about the social ramifications of teaching more cohort groups the economic advantages of adopting sustainability. My personal goal with this project is to use this project to

explore why more cohorts in this age range, income classification and minority ethnic groups don’t have this education. After being told by John Wegner that minorities “simply weren’t interested in sustainability”, I was curious to know what kind of cultural issues have arisen that has presented these barriers for Wegner -- or was this simply a xenophobic fear of the impoverished black community. After investigating the claims a bit further through my own participation in these programs, I began to understand either way that closing this tremendous achievement gap was much more critical than pointing fingers in such an important area of social responsibility.

Target Demographic

The cohorts, for whom the project was designed to serve, have very little information about the impact of sustainable practices in their everyday lives. These groups of students, most of whom are African American Berea College students between the ages of 18 and 25, are very active in the campus community. They have been able to do so because they fall within the economic restrictions for the college which only offers free tuition to students who demonstrate promise and excessive financial need.

Cultural Barriers

Noam Chomsky argues, “Knowledge is not ability; it is not explicable in terms of skills, habits, or dispositions. Learning doesn't achieve lasting results when you don't see any point to it. Learning has to come from the inside. You have to want to learn, if you want to learn you'll learn no matter what (Voshell).

Many of the African American students in the Black Cultural Center were asked if they knew what sustainability was. Most who were questioned answered that they knew about recycling. Some had recently learned about composting through the introduction of the new campus-wide program and had been implementing the practices as they were instructed to do in their classes or jobs. But most African American students working in Berea’s Black Cultural Center had no knowledge of how sustainability could be used practically to save them money, save the environment, or boost economic development and food security in their communities.

Learning to Engages Young African Americans

While the initial investigation sought to find way to make the topics and social implications of sustainability more relatable to the students who fell within the targeted cohort group through an internet blog. But the lack of relatable material and African American images made it difficult to communicate to the students within this cohort what living a healthy and sustainable lifestyle even looked like. For the African American students, the lack of identification and holistic images that these students could identify with made it very difficult to know how to make the information engaging and relatable for the cohorts.

While a couple of ideas, such as the blog post about the history of the African American diet, elicited a positive response, the amount of the content supplied and the supplements; videos,

graphs, photographs, etc. were not interactive enough to encourage long-term participation and the blog site hits decreased from 81 hits per day within the first week to 34 hits at the close of the short term. This phenomenon was also due to the lack of the presence of an informed and engaged facilitator to encourage students to check out the information on the blog site once the term ended. But the one statement from the blog site that did stand out for one of the students in a post about the need for healthier, more accessible sources of food in black nutrition that stated “Are you a slave, then why do you still keep eating like one,” has encouraged some students like Triston to think more mindfully about the types of foods provided for the Black Cultural Center programs (Jones and Leslie). Further engagement and encouragement from the campus community on the new composting program has also helped the center to adopt the practice of composting in during the day to day operation of the center as well as during their programmed events.

Lack of Identifiable Leadership

As for the multimedia content, the lack of engaging content did not hold the long term interest of the students (Pell). Cross cultural barriers such as the stigma of farming because of its historical association with slavery made many of the narratives within the pieces unidentifiable; even the animated films and posting made accessible via Hulu and Youtube (The Future of Food). Although outlets such as the internet and social media have made it easier for progressive black students already interested in sustainability practices to network and establish community development ideas for projects in Africa. The community development focus is very limited and does not teach those who live in domestic urban and impoverished communities how easily sustainability projects can be researched, and how they can be used to improve the quality of life for individuals in these communities.

Students like Chris, president of the Black Student Union understand that sustainability is important but have not thought to do independent research (Perkins). “It’s like that thing you built,” he told me pointing to the unfinished window farm and the germinated seedlings. “I don’t mind watering that thing outside and I’m happy to help, but other than knowing that it has something to do with food and that it’s sustainable I don’t really understand why it’s important or what it is.” I’d spoken with Chris about the project several times. He even helped me purchase some of the parts at his first visit to the hardware store. That’s when I realized what a challenge community engagement can be, as well as why it is one of the most critical barriers to overcome in intercultural sustainability communication. Although I do have to admit, before this project I spent very little time in the Black Cultural Center.

Subsequently, after seeking out African American eco-design engineers or in fields related to sustainability on Google, I found very few links that provided access to other African Americans with these specialized backgrounds. The two I did find in visible leadership positions, Robert Bullard and Will Allen, had only adopted sustainability practices so that they could give back to their ailing communities; a value they had learned through practicing other fields.

While I was discussing the contributions of Will Allen with one of the other students at a banquet, I overheard one of the African American professors ask who in the world Will Allen was. The other professor, shrugged and the subject wasn’t mentioned again. This moment

helped me to understand that the problem didn’t just exist among African American youth, but somewhere along the way we neglected to elicit the interest of our educators and leaders as well. While people like Will Allen, the basketball player aren’t as notable as Magic Johnson or Lebron James; his contributions through his urban gardening and educational program Growing Power, have allowed Allen to transform his local community in more significant ways that any line of sneakers would (Growing Power and Leslie). For all of his efforts, Allen is widely respected by educators, progressives and activists who hope to learn how to transform their own communities the way he did in inner city Milwaukee through sustainability projects like urban gardening. And yet even though his work could be easily deserving of an NAACP image award, there is little chance that Allen will be recognized by the greater black community for no other reason than because people have never heard of him. This brings up an interesting question: how many other African Americans are doing this kind of crucial and important work? And why have we never heard of them?

With the number of African Americans in the media or visible leadership positions, you would think that more African Americans would take advantage of this opportunity to expand this thriving market to feature more African American members in Sierra Club magazines, or hosting eco design renovation shows for television. Currently the only image of economic development in the black community on television is done on hosted by Ty Pennington Extreme Makeover (Mooallem). Pennington’s efforts and visible contributions have made him a household name in young African American culture. But it can be certainly baffling to think of how the families on the show will be able to keep up with those costs once he’s gone. And are those who literally climb great heights to serve the needs of the community through the field of sustainability and conservation are just not making the effort to be visible enough to the rest of the African American community? Or have they simply not positioned themselves in a visible manner because they are unaware of the potential they have to use their visibility as a way to create more advantage and opportunity for younger African Americans?

Currently there seems to be a prevailing attitude among many African Americans that conservation and environmentalism is just one of those wacky things that white people do, or hippies (Robinson). The lack of relatable and identifiable leaders seen using socially responsible conservation practices has created a perception that African Americans are materialistic, uneducated and ethically misguided (Burrell). Poverty advocates like Ron Sider who point out the economic disparities often imply in their publications that African Americans represent the largest percent of the impoverished population because faith based organizations have not protected them well enough from spiritual corruption (Sider 39). Would you be receptive to learn from someone who thought of you like that? And yet these are the undertones I perceived from Dr. Wegner when discussing why the sustainability initiatives in the Atlanta area were only initiated in white communities. It could very well be that perhaps the African Americans were interested in sustainability, but simply weren’t connecting with him.

For younger African Americans or those who have grown up more culturally isolated, identification and perception is a key component of minority participation. As Cornel West comments in his book Race Matters, “Like black politicians, black scholars fall into three basic types – race-distancing elitists, race – embracing rebels, and race-transcending prophets (West 64).” And these are the archetypes that most young black scholarships have been taught to

recognize. But these archetypes like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have begun to turn into caricatures for the younger generation. Young African Americans have begun to reject these stereotypes by creating models of scholarship and entrepreneurship that reject this type of stereotypical education. This model of innovation has allowed young African Americans such as Pharrel and Sean Carter to break through economic barriers in ways that are more appealing to their younger peers because they use images that they can recognize (Robinson). It has also opened the door for young African Americans to bridge cultural gaps and promote inclusivity, even though the culture was initially founded upon black ownership.

The hip hop industry generates over $10 billion dollars a year because investors see how lucrative and valuable it is to sell an identifiable image of African American culture (Watson). Clothing lines such as FUBU, one of the first hip hop clothing lines created an entire social movement based upon African American identification and entrepreneurship based upon the rumor that Oprah Winfrey kicked Tommy Hilfiger off of her show after expressing that non-white ethnic groups would stop buying his clothes (Oprah.com). Winfrey confirmed that this never happened, but the rumors created the idea to urban youth around the United States that African American branding and image was important.

Practical Methods & Engaged Methods for Learning

Robert Bullard uses popular cultural references and relatable imagery when describing the lack of access to healthy food when he describes what food deserts are to his students at Morehouse. He also mixes comical imagery and humor into these discussions to help young African American students understand his ideas better about environmental justice. This is helpful when he describes the environmental and disparities that exist in Atlanta to students in his OpEdNews article.

Atlanta's wealthier neighborhoods have more than three times as many supermarkets as poor neighborhoods, limiting access for many people to the basic elements of a healthy diet. When broken down by race, not just wealth, researchers have found that there are four times as many supermarkets in predominantly white neighborhoods as in black neighborhoods. Low-income residents also pay 10 to 40 percent more for food than higher income residents (Bullard).

Bullard also uses pop-culture references that black students can recognize to discuss the ethnic and environmental exclusion of African Americans from sustainability initiatives stating that “While Atlanta goes green, full service supermarkets are closing in black neighborhoods.”

In his article, “Black Atlantans Left Behind as the City Goes Green and Sustainable” Bullard continues to use these explanations to convey to students that access to healthy food lowers the risk for obesity and other diet-related illnesses (Bullard). He also uses a case study in which the closing of a supermarket in 2009 that left thousands of black residents a food desert to share that even though Atlanta is home to the largest concentration of black millionaires and has risen to the 19th ranking among U.S. sustainable cities, that “just because green jobs, including clean energy and construction jobs, are available in Metro Atlanta does not automatically translate into jobs for Black Atlantans.” Bullard explains to students how residents who live on the "wrong

side of the tracks" are subjected to elevated environmental health threats stating that “Place matters.” Bullard continues to explain that place “limits access to health care and residential amenities such as parks and green space, full-service grocery stores, farmers markets, and healthy food retail outlets” and discusses that

Many of Atlanta's black neighborhoods are saturated with fast food outlets, liquor stores, and convenience stores that make their profits off junk food, beer, wine, and cigarettes. Convenience stores industry account for 27 percent of teen purchases of tobacco. Food redlining forces many poor black Atlantans to spend more money and time, and travel farther and accept lower quality and less healthy food. Food shopping at convenience stores takes its toll in higher prices in health costs. Convenience stores mark up food prices by at least 20 percent, amounting to a tax of $1,200 a year per family in higher food expenses for residents of "food deserts (Bullard)."

The images Bullard paints, that many African Americans can easily relate to is the perception that the “Green movement” is a corporate mechanism used to create economic disparity rather that the community resilience movement that was designed for community development. Students seemed particularly receptive to Bullard’s enthusiastic and mutually engaging approach. By describing food insecurity and environmental pollution in a way that students could recognize, students were able to understand how environmentalism is relevant to their communities and others who live in low income neighborhoods. These images of undervalued African American communities throughout history have been a familiar part of black cultural education ever since African Americans have begun to look for liberation and answers to why these disparities exist. Students are receptive to these lessons because it is an acknowledgement that these disparities actually do exist.

Overcoming Xenophobic Exclusion

There is a misconception among many low income people that those who live in the inner city have to leave urban environments to learn how to live sustainably or have a better quality of life. But for some, creating these images of black inferiority or the perception of inferior poverty cultures serve as critical barriers to teaching African Americans about the social and economic advantages to learning more about sustainability (Erickson 3-5). This is because often assumptions are made about these groups willingness and capacity to learn.

Dr. Bullard believes that the quality of life in low income urban communities will never improve without advocacy for environmental justice and education. But without culturally identifiable role models or relatable and enthusiastic advocates to teach how sustainability models can be adopted without creating more economic disparities, it is difficult to interest black students in taking the initiative to learn more about sustainability.

Students like Oliver, who is double majoring in Chemistry and Political Science do not always fit the model of a student who admires the urban mainstream culture. For his peer group, Oliver is considered to be particularly conservative or an exception to the rule. But Oliver, like many other assimilated students within his cohort range began thinking about sustainability as a skeptic even though he considered himself to be quite better educated than most of his peers.

During the fall semester of a Berea College SENS course, titled “Sustainable Appalachian Communities,” Oliver learned about the economic ramifications of resource scarcity and overpopulation and expressed a very nihilistic attitude about what he thought we could do to fix these challenges. His solution to the gloom and doomsday messages was the same as many of today’s political leaders, to build better arms and defense systems or establish military alliances with nations in order to protect the depleting reserves of crude oil. But after watching Megan Quinn’s Video “Learning from Cuba’s response to Peak Oil,” Oliver gained a different perspective. By learning about how the Republic of Cuba was able to rebound from the brink of famine at the close of the cold war, Oliver became hopeful that through greater community awareness and education (Cristian). He also believed that by giving people the vocational skills to make the infrastructural changes necessary to expand this community development model that even the most impoverished communities could use the lessons that he learned from this visual representation of Cuba’s “green revolution.”

The Cuban response to the oil embargos after the collapse of the Soviet Union illustrated a very achievable and measurable model of how sustainable agriculture could be used to boost economic development in areas where people needed food. It made sense economically, that in a place where people were living on rations of half a banana and cup of rice a day that the appropriate response would be for the Cubans to learn how to grow their own food through the education of organic community gardening.

But in the United States, urban horticulture is seen by many as a cultural fad adopted by environmentalists and urban trendsetters who wish to use the “green movement” to generate corporate green (Phillips). Those who are unfamiliar with the urban horticulture movement fail to realize that the primary foundation of the practice of sustainable community gardening is the emphasis upon inclusion. Without the community there can be no community garden. And those who do not live in areas with high levels of diversity, trust and inclusion may misunderstand what an important tool practices like community horticulture can bring to creating community inclusion. Thankfully, many of the participants in these types of programs do realize that.

Zack, an environmental activist who works for HEAL, one of Berea College’s service learning programs centered on sustainability education affirms, “I get really excited when we have someone who’s not white come to a HEAL meeting. I think we need to be more involved in the everyday life of more students. ” It was HEAL that approached the Black Cultural Center about the composting project in order to make the concept more appealing, to what Zack referred to as, “everyday people (Danneman).”

The lack of understanding of the importance of practical sustainability practices and the lack of leaders like Zack who enthusiastically engage his peers without thought to negative cultural distinctions illustrates a success in overcoming the untapped resource potential of integrating sustainability education across cultural boundaries and within low income communities.

The “Green” Achievement Gap

Cuba was also able to integrate sustainability into the framework for rebuilding their infrastructure in a way that community gardening, and organic agricultural education became more than some “get rich quick scheme.” By understanding the practical applications of how sustainability can be used to increase community resilience and economic development, the people of Cuba created a shift in social and educational priorities and now organic farming is one of the highest revenue producing jobs.

But in the African American community, the achievement gap in math and science education and the gap in interest in sustainability education due to historical associations with slavery make it difficult to find engaged educators who can facilitate this education (Robinson). Students need to understand the similarities of slavery and how modern day agriculture is produced from teachers who have an awareness of the most effective learning methods and cultural sensitivity to be able to generate interest in the practical applications of sustainability education. One way of approaching this would be to introduce students to culturally relevant misunderstandings about sustainability and the corporate “green movement” as well as provide students with an understanding of how true resilience based sustainability education can be used as a mechanism and model for economic development. By using the adoption of community based sustainability as a tool to teach students practical vocational skills or how DIY sustainability projects can be used to guide students through the process of design and innovation, these programs can give students hands on experience that would even be effective in helping students visualize applications they would need to do better in math and science (Robinson).

Most sustainability programs for low income communities are focused upon community development initiatives and without recognizable African American advocates who can illustrate models of how sustainability works to generate economic security. Tim Robinson, a high school teacher from Greenfield, Massachusetts works with a group of community educators to educate low income students how they can use vocational projects such as building solar ovens to prepare his students for college (Robinson). By working on projects such as learning how to insulate and retrofit homes with solar hot water heaters Robinson believes that he will better prepare his African American and Latino students to gain better access to the emerging demand for green jobs. Similarly, Dr. Tashia Bradley of the Berea College black Cultural Center has begun to implement programs such as composting and African American nutrition programs to create a dialogue with students about how sustainability can be used to teach students about how these practices can be used to address culturally specific issues in African American health.

And without more accessible and culturally relevant education the gap in these lessons for healthy and holistic living will continue to threaten the community resilience of low income African Americans and the achievement gap in education, health and the workforce will continue to widen.

Better practical training

In order to teach African Americans why sustainability is important, the Savor the Earth Hydroponic Window Farm Project can be used as a mechanism to address culturally specific issues for African Americans so that students can become more engaged in researching and developing their own resilience models. By including a supplement of programming and by

illustrating how sustainability can be used in an evolving manual of student perspectives and development opportunities, students can begin to see a transformation in themselves and how they approach challenging issues. By beginning to explore how techniques and topics in sustainability can help students to develop unexplored career opportunities students can create their own perspectives and understandings of how they can make their own contributions to the field from the forefront of the sustainability movement; instead of hesitant participants from America’s margins. It is important that we learn how to use interactive learning to create a culture of social responsible innovation among African American students. Instead of just teaching black students how our history reflects our present, it is equally imperative that we also give students constructive and practical applications as a mechanism to critically evaluate and develop sustainable solutions to these issues. By learning to recognize cultural differences and approaches to learning, educators can learn how to engage low income students better and be able to instill important values in this group of cohorts. Students must learn the value of thinking their way through emerging issues, deconstructing the relevant and approachable parts of the problems if they are to gain any experience learning how to fix them. And the most effective yet overlooked method for creating these important facets for learning would be to expose African American students to identifiable images of these models or teach these students how to create them.

Students who learn to proactively develop constructive models to solve relevant problems will be better prepared to integrate a very valuable skill that can be used as a marketable niche along their career paths. They can also develop a foundation to begin building a more forward thinking perspective, in which they do not just see the systemic failures of the past, but begin to believe they can proactively embrace the challenges of the future as well.

Fortunately, because of the lack of representation of African American perspectives and developed models for how sustainability can be used to increase personal development and community transformation, this presents a unique opportunity for the students who learn about the installation. By learning how interactive and image focused model can be used to develop center programming to address topics and concerns that have risen over the “green movement” regarding accessibility and sustainability including:

Food Security Personal Growth Income

Diversification Small Scale

Opportunities for Economic Development

Personal Growth (holistic)

Nutrition Education Mental Illness GMOs

Globalization Working class Retrofitting Pv panels Green products

don’t seem affordable

Achievement Gap (Vocational skill level)

Education Gap Finding Time to be

Sustainable when

you live in a lifestyle trap

Lack of Interest Perception: hippie

versus corporate culture

Lack of Diversity

Black & Green Disparities: the problem of district disparities

Peak Oil & what it means for low

income communities

Slavery & the stigmas of farming

to name a few.

Conclusion

As a result of failed early attempts to engage my younger peers in sustainability education, it became imperative that the primary goal of the Savor the Earth Hydroponic Window Farm Project be to provide students with the opportunity to learn the practical applications of sustainability. Without learning these vital community resilience principles students would be unable to understand and recognize why models like sustainability can be effective teaching tools to improve community development in more ways than just saving a few trees.

By learning to develop such a complex project and encountering challenges I gained firsthand experience with many of the cultural and educational development challenges that make it difficult to include more African American perspectives in the emerging field of sustainability. But the challenges encountered in this project also provided an opportunity to facilitate an ongoing dialogue with the Black Cultural Center about many of the cross cultural barriers and practical applications of working on more projects within this field. By working through the process of innovation, I not only learned how to use the physical tools and cultivate a rudimentary model for community engagement using a minimum amount of resources, I also have been able to identify key areas that I can work on with my peers as a collective.

The Savor the Earth Hydroponic Window Farm Project serves as a reminder to myself and other students within the African American community that in order to find better opportunities for ourselves and for our communities, that sometimes we must be willing to seek out the unfamiliar. We must also be flexible and proactive enough to find constructive alternatives to addressing relevant problems before they get out of hand. The current method of education that has left us frustrated with the system, devaluing ourselves or apathetic toward a culture black youth have grown tired of trying to assimilate to may be the reality as it exists today. But by learning how to look at key challenges and innovate new ideas in a way that addresses relevant issues and appeals to the interest of our peers, we can begin to transform our expectations and move beyond the barrier of perceived inadequacy and learn to create new realities for ourselves. But this does not mean that we should overlook the importance of unfamiliar cultural lessons because the other culture engages in behaviors that we do not understand. There are principles and truths behind every movement and phenomenon that engages people’s interests and if we pay attention, we might just be lucky enough to find the one truth that we can use to create a path to freedom; real freedom, not just for our communities but also for ourselves.

Works Cited

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Bullard, Robert. Berea College Convocation Speaker Interview. Personal Interview by Monica Leslie. February 2010. Berea College.

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