I could remember that the river was somewhere no one went to
that. It was dirty. So that's how we grew up with it. This
is the way to break those chains. This is the way to
help them to dream.
My name is Kiana Kazemi. And today we're chatting
with Brendan Shane climate director of trust for
public land together. We'll learn about how the organization is
tackling America's Park Equity problems through their
Community schoolyards projects. So Brenda tell
me what exactly is Park Equity one of the high level
definitions we use is just who literally has access. So
that's the hundred million people who can't walk
to a park in 10 minutes. There's also then
questions about the type of part in communities that
identify as people of color you've got
parks with less space. We want to connect everyone to the outdoors.
So do you have any ideas where you're gonna find thousands of
new spaces? I mean when I
think about my city that sounds almost impossible. Yeah, it
would be except that. We have a solution and that's cool
yards the idea that you can take what are often asphalt playing
really uninspiring spaces that aren't serving
the community and transform those into a
community schoolyard that serves
The day and the whole Community the rest of
the time there's a huge potential there. So Brendan, what does it
take to go from this planning stage to
actually building a thing. This here is a conceptual design for
the Mastery High School of North Camden Carmen ubury.
She's the community coordinator. She really
started with her students. She brought the students together to see what elements
they wanted to see and in a park and so you
see the ideas that the students have brought forward and community members
as well all represented in the concept that
then moves forward to final design.
We caught up with Carmen uberry the community
coordinator at Mastery High School Carmen helps
bridge the gap between Trust for Public land and the
City of Camden to help community members unlock
the full potential of the outdoors when we
realized that we had space in the back of the school
that connected to the water. It's just a beautiful
Waterfront area that was untouched we thought
about how to make this space a place
where we can develop some
stem learning. Let's get a group of students. They
talked about all sorts of things what they
want to see in the park and it came up with phenomenal ideas
like solar lights and a way to drain the
water when our city gets flooded was just
very encouraging to see them so excited about it
and so ready to move
forward with it. So Kiana, we're we're running
downtown DC at a park that's been revitalized and
renovated in the last few years in cooperation with
And so you can see what it what it means in reality to
go from the schematics and the ideas to work on
the ground because sometimes it's years of planning right and then the
whole community and design and then go into construction and
then the gates come down the fences come down. So bam,
you know, that's kids are there the families are there classrooms start
using those spaces. This is the transformation that
really should happen in every school. Everyone deserves
it.
You know sitting over here and looking out at the beautiful Green Space
looking at the playground. I can't imagine the amount
of Cooperative action that had to come together from the
community to make this happen. Yeah, there's so many small steps
so many different people and resources that
are that are necessary and then along standing
relationship with REI that allows you
to you know, create the better Outdoors that everyone needs
when I'm thinking about how I can continue to support movements
like this. I love to use Rei's Cooperative
Action Network to stay alerted on
where to be and how to show up to support
movements like this, you know, the beautiful thing about
so many individuals taking climate action
is that the sum of all of their work creates really
meaningful change. This is what inspires me
and the work we do it TPL is the
potential to make that change to create a vision
so that future Generations can you know build climate
resilience and improve communities?
And and provide a better Outdoors to be
able to now provide access to our students and
our families is even more powerful for
us. It's it's where we want to
go. And so we need to break down those
barriers. We need to move all of
that out the way and give the students
the children the families access to
the water what better way to do it than through Community
Partnerships. That's how you do it.
you