Harvest Celebration of Abundant Progress: Streams of Sustainability and Justice Woven Together at DeWitt Clinton High School

Friends, neighbors, community members, students around the ceremonial fire at our 7th annual Harvest Celebration, November 10, 2016. (photo by Nathanial Gary)

Our 7^th Annual Harvest Celebration took place at DeWitt Clinton High School on November 10, 2016.  We celebrated our most recent harvest and numerous accomplishments over the past year with a ceremony led by Roman Guaraguaorix (Redhawk) Perez, the Kacike (chief) for Maisiti Yukayeke Taino; a tribe of the Taino Nation.  We gathered in fellowship around a fire, sang and participated in a snake dance.  We also stood in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are protecting water from the likelihood of contamination from oil pipelines that have been proposed to traverse sacred Native American sites in North Dakota.  Towards the end of the ceremony, Redhawk asked each of us to place an offering of a pinch of tobacco in the raised beds of our new community garden built this past summer by community volunteers and student interns as a gesture of thanks to the earth for sharing with us its bounty and protection.  The community garden was built after we received a United Way Seed Grant of $30,000 sponsored by our school’s Community Based Partner Organization, Good Shepherd.  Award-winning chef Noah Sheetz of Hudson Valley Chef's Consortium capped the evening with his gracefully prepared and amazingly delicious garden to table treats served with hot cider on what was a windy and cold but gorgeous Fall evening with the moon waxing towards its super status days later.   

Roman Redhawk Perez leading the Snake Dance at the site of our new community garden.    (photo by Nathanial Gary)

Earlier in the day, a community planning session was held in the school library to gather more ideas and creativity from our attendees about the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center and the Baldwin Trail that is being designed to facilitate universal access around our school building.  Linda Pollak, and her team from Marpillero Pollak Architects are conceiving a trail that will circumnavigate the school building at a 5% incline so as to create new spaces for community activities, create a sense of circularity around the building, and be completely accessible and ADA compliant.  Our castle on the parkway may have been built as a fortress but unfortunately large swaths of campus are not presently accessible to students or adults in wheel chairs or children in strollers.  Even our the narrow single lane ramp to the lower parking lot shared by vehicle traffic in two directions only grants access to the playing fields and school garden.  There is presently no access from there to the Goulden Avenue side of the building without climbing steep and crumbling steps by the tennis courts.  There were some new and eager community members who gathered around a planning "game" that Marpillero Pollak Architects created as a beautiful and effective means of gathering input from the community.  There was also valuable interaction with our students many of whom were being introduced to the project for the first time.  Though we are unlikely to build a Walmart on our campus, no student suggestion went unheard or was unappreciated.  I don't think any of us were ever asked to contribute ideas to the creation of a public space and in such an exciting and accommodating manner.

At the planning session, the team from Marpillero Pollak Architects lead students and community on a game that let them choose an identity, and then activities and design elements that they envision at different points along the Baldwin Trail. (photo by Henry O.)

Jessie Kerr-Vanderslice, Director of Grow to Learn, explains the game to the curious.            (photo by Nathanial Gary)

During the whole day there was a tremendous synergy that coalesced around the idea of creating the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center and Trail in memory and honor of the contributions made to social justice by this great American writer and as a means to access and create community spaces on the campus of our community school.  For instance, students from my senior English classes displayed their Lives that Matter projects consisting of profiles of vulnerable friends or victims of state violence and inspired by our study of the Black Lives Matter movement and its precedents in the writing and activism of DeWitt Clinton alumnus James Baldwin.  Students in my Sustainability class displayed maps they had created after researching the ratio of healthy food to fast food options in their neighborhoods.  Their findings clearly indicate that our students live predominantly in food desserts where the availability of healthy food and restaurants is severely limited.  If students were looking for signs of hope they might have been inspired by the accomplishments the Environmental Affairs Club that were also on display.  Hopefully some of our students in attendance were motivated to join the club whose dedication to environmental awareness and service has helped build and maintain The Clinton Garden, our award winning school garden, for the past seven years. 

Sustainability students pouring over their maps that reveal that a majority of them live in food deserts. (photo by Nathanial Gary)

We are breaking the mold at DeWitt Clinton High School and this is the mold of the failing, under-performing and impoverished large urban overcrowded high school.  We are creating in its place a new model for community schools.  This is most evident in our what is perhaps our most ambitious project of all, the establishment of a high production indoor hydroponic farm in room 332, the last remaining DeWitt Clinton classroom on the third floor of our DeWitt Clinton Campus building.  Our students predominantly come from areas in the Bronx that are food deserts.  We are about to become a school that not only educates our community and its young people in a real world way, but feeds them healthy food and educates them on how to eat well with an abundant supply. What is perhaps most radical is that we are teaching our young people how to grow their own food, indoors on a massive scale, and outdoors as well, and providing them with cutting-edge skills that boost their college readiness and employability.  We are addressing, in the most bold and spirited way I know, the still neglected role of healthy diet and healthy living on learning. 

Sustainability students in the midst of their food mapping project visited this neighborhood farmer's market that is run by Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. (photo by Nathanial Gary).

 

Perhaps after reading about all of our projects you might consider contributing to our crowdfundingcampaign that is running through the month of December.  Help us raise the money to build three farms in three schools (including DeWitt Clinton) that will grow 60,000 lbs of produce for families.  It will be an investment towards DeWitt Clinton’s abundant future. 

 

We found this shell/fossil/relic at the site of our ceremonial fire a few days later and learned that it had been gifted to us by Roman Guaraguaorix (Redhawk) Perez, the Kacike (chief) for Maisiti Yukayeke Taino; a tribe of the Taino Nation. (photo by Ray Pultinas)

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