Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 23, 2005|Volume 34, Number 4

Jeannette Thomas is one of the New Haven residents who helped conceive and create the Ivy Narrow Bird Preserve, a URI project.

In Focus: Urban Resources Initiative

Initiative brings neighbors together
to create green oases in the city

If you take a tour of New Haven neighborhoods, chances are you'll happen on a glade of ornamental trees or an oasis of pastoral green tucked into the gray urban landscape.

The mulched flowerbed along a city street or the tiny park with blooming shrubs may very well represent the efforts of Yale's Urban Resources Initiative (URI), a program of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

For 11 years, the URI has been providing New Haven residents with expertise, equipment and perennial plants to reforest the streetscape and turn derelict urban space into planted habitats. The non-profit organization's official mission statement is "to foster community-based land stewardship, promote environmental education and advance the practice of urban forestry," but its motivating principle is simple: Healthy environments make healthy communities, and vice versa.

Every year, the URI invites New Haven community organizations and civic groups to identify specific projects to improve their neighborhoods. These proposals might range from converting an abandoned lot into an urban nature reserve to planting a row of trees along a busy street, says Colleen Murphy-Dunning, the director of the URI. But most often, the goals all fall into three basic categories: making the neighborhood look better, making it safer and making it a friendlier place for neighbors to meet one another.

A critical consideration for the URI is not so much the project itself as the fact that members of the community have come together to agree on their mutual priorities, notes Murphy-Dunning.

"The landscape we want to work in is dictated by people," she says, citing Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the grassroots Green Belt Movement, as an inspiration for community-based environmental activism. Maathai, a native of Kenya who was a visiting fellow at Yale's Global Institute for Sustainable Forestry in 2002, has stressed that the key to empowerment lies in taking charge of the environment. Under her leadership, thousands of disenfranchised women have been planting trees across Kenya's degraded land.

Working with the URI, residents of New Haven's inner city have been applying the same principle by stocking the depleted "urban forest" with sustainable growth: trees, shrubs and plants that return from year to year, notes Murphy-Dunning.

The projects that have been supported by the URI vary widely in function, form and city location -- from the newly landscaped grounds around the Mitchell Library in Westville and the replanted cherry trees in Wooster Square to the small informal arboretum on Nash Street in the East Rock neighborhood. So far, the URI has created 15 parks out of vacant lots and rehabilitated 15 others that had fallen into disuse. One of its more ambitious projects is the Ivy Narrow Bird Preserve at the corner of Ivy Street and Dixwell Avenue. A barren and unused tract of land when the URI was invited to help develop it, the park is now an urban oasis with a central pond -- known in the trade as a "perched water table" -- which was created to promote biodiversity as well as to attract birds.

A once-barren tract of land at the corner of Ivy Street and Dixwell Avenue is now a bird sanctuary, thanks to a collaboration between the URI and area residents.

Two programs within the URI carry out its mission. The first, Community Greenspace, provides supplies and expertise to groups trying to restore their neighborhoods. "We have three goals to our program: One is the restoration of the environment. The second one is community building ... and the third one is stewardship," says Christopher Ozyck, a professional landscaper who leads the program.

"Stewardship," he explains, refers to the long-term commitment the groups make to maintain the environment. "We get them to see themselves as stewards not just for the work they have done but for the neighborhood, and more broadly speaking for the city," says Ozyck.

Getting people active in restoring their neighborhoods has the added advantage of forging relationships among neighbors, many of whom may never have met before, he notes, adding that perhaps the greatest asset of all is the sense of empowerment the program brings to the members of the community it serves. "They learn to see themselves as actors in their environment rather than as victims of it," says Ozyck, echoing the Maathai creed.

While a primary aim of the program is to benefit New Haven communities, Greenspace also provides invaluable training to student interns by teaching them to become "community foresters" practiced in managing the urban environment and interfacing with diverse community groups.

There are between eight and 10 interns each year, and each works with six different community groups over 14 weeks during the summer. Most are F&ES students, but they can represent a variety of academic disciplines, according to Murphy-Dunning, noting a recent Divinity School graduate is among the current crop of interns. They also represent every corner of the globe. This year, four of the eight interns are foreign students from Madagascar, Peru, South Korea and Laos.

For Anna Paydeh, the only current intern who is not affiliated with Yale, the program has many benefits beyond the professional experience. A graduate of Macalester College, Paydeh has been working with "emeritus" community groups, neighborhood organizations that have finished the planting phase of their projects but need support and guidance to maintain them. An environmental studies and anthropology major, Peydeh is especially enthusiastic about the social aspects of the URI program. "The groups I'm working with are all really into seeing things happen in their neighborhoods, and that's very exciting," she says.

A recent transplant to New Haven, Paydeh is also delighted at the opportunity her internship has given her to get to know the city. "I have a much broader picture of New Haven than I ever would have gotten if I didn't work for URI," she says.

Another URI program, Open Space as Learning Places, introduces 5th-grade students in New Haven's public schools to environmental science, with schoolyards, city parks, greenspaces, area ponds and rivers, and even cemeteries serving as their outdoor classrooms. In their schoolyards, the students begin to see the familiar outdoor space as a natural habitat for indigenous flora and fauna. They also learn about the historical, geographical and ecological context of their school's backyard.

In the greenspace unit of the curriculum, the 5th-graders get insight into the ways humans can affect change in their environment and how changes in the neighborhood environment can affect its human inhabitants. When the school children come to visit the Greenspace, they often meet with volunteers from the Community Greenspace program, who -- it is hoped -- will become role models for the youngsters, notes Murphy-Dunning.

In their local park, students become acquainted with different varieties of indigenous species, learning to identify trees and denizens of the ground and air. In the program's river and pond components, the youngsters learn how freshwater circulates, the importance of watersheds to wildlife and humans, and why water is a precious resource that needs to be conserved. Finally, using the local cemetery as their laboratory, students observe some of the fundamentals of life on earth generally and the history of their community specifically, from the rocks and minerals that form the earth's crust to the collective stories of those whose legacies define their society.

After the hoes have been hung up and the leaves of New Haven's urban forest have fallen, the intangible effects of the URI's work are still felt in the communities it serves. Murphy-Dunning notes that the program has been so successful in promoting neighborhood camaraderie that residents who have worked with the URI during the summer often continue to get together informally outside of the growing season. In fact, members of one Block Watch group take turns hosting Sunday gatherings at their homes during the winter, she says. Soup is the standard fare, and planning for the next neighborhood improvement is among the topics of conversation.

"This proves that the greening of the city is more than just about the physical environment," Murphy-Dunning observes. "It's a chance for people to build relationships to each other."

-- By Dorie Baker

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