This year, my SPA Leadership team and I completed an action project that aligned with our issue group’s topic: the environment and sustainability. At the beginning of the project, we brainstormed the different ways in which we saw problems within the environment and how different environmental crises are being handled. We discussed the things we were passionate about and what we wanted to see change, and soon, we concluded that we were all passionate about fixing environmental racism and wanted to do a project that helped the earth and the people disproportionately affected by pollution. We decided that we wanted to do something involving urban gardens, and so we got started on the research portion of our project. The entire first semester we took a deep dive into the world of urban gardening, learning about the many benefits that helped to alleviate air pollution, food insecurity, and increase the overall health of urban residents. The first semester gave us a chance to really learn so much and marinate on what we wanted to do with this project.
Navigating this new virtual space was difficult, especially because our topic had such hands-on possibilities, but we eventually realized that we could make a substantial impact even if we didn’t get to plant a physical garden. After almost a year of taking classes and attending events on zoom, we felt as though we were able to get a message across by hosting a zoom seminar panel about urban gardening. So, we started to plan and organize our speakers and questions in order to educate people on the benefits of urban gardening. We were able to get three amazing speakers to be a part of our discussion, Ibti Vincent from FreshFarm, Vicky Keichel, an astute professor from American University, and Alex Morales of the Green Village Initiative. We also launched a social media campaign in which we designed posts in order to educate people about urban gardens, but also to promote our upcoming zoom discussion. Our Instagram gained about 85 followers and reached many more people through story reposts and shares. Then, after a few months of hard work, we hosted the zoom panel with 30 people in attendance! We were ecstatic to see so many people interested in urban gardening and hopefully, people were inspired by the discussion