The Kids Are Alright, and They’re Fixing Their Neighborhoods After Natural Disasters

Andrea Colon spent her Halloweens making the journey to the far side of Rockaway Peninsula, an 11-mile length of land jutting out of Queens, New York. She knew that the west side of the peninsula was where the rich families lived. And their wealth meant a bigger, better haul of treats than the one she would’ve earned had she stayed put on the east side.
But when she entered high school, she realized the holiday wasn’t just a night of costume and treats: It was a reflection of the myriad of disparities that divided the lives of the 127,000 residents of Rockaway Peninsula. 
The houses along the west side tend to belong to wealthy, white families. Residents on the east side are typically minorities and lower-income residents. People who live on the west side have private beaches, yacht clubs and the Rockaway Farmers Market. The east side is regarded as a food desert lacking in options for affordable, fresh and healthy food — perhaps one of the key reasons why its residents face high rates of obesity and diabetes. Whereas wealthy commuters on the west side are better positioned — financially and geographically — to get to work, commuters on the east side are more likely to rely on public transportation, where the dearth of options means they must face commutes averaging 53 minutes in each direction a day, the longest commutes of any New York City residents.
The more Colon learned about the chasm of inequality in her own backyard, the more the high school student realized she had to do something. So in 2016, during her junior year, she joined the Rockaway Youth Task Force (RYTF).
RYTF is a “for youth, by youth” group of 60 young people organizing at the grassroots level to equalize outcomes across race and class lines within its community. 
“It’s about coming together as young people and trying to get access to spaces where these things are talked about,” Colon, now 18 and lead organizer for the group, told NationSwell. “The youth voice is just not very present.”
 
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When RYTF was founded in 2011, it initially focused on neighborhood beautification projects and community improvements. Then, in the year following the organization’s founding, Hurricane Sandy hit.
“I think that’s when it all came full circle, and we all just started having more of a social justice lens in thinking about issues that impact our community,” Colon said.
The devastating superstorm left parts of Rockaway without electricity or access to medical attention for weeks and subway service was suspended for seven months. Local grocery stores were destroyed. Colon said families turned to bodegas for food, and despite their best efforts, those corner stores weren’t able to reliably provide fresh produce to customers.
So in 2013, the youth group rallied for access to a vacant, half-acre lot on Beach 54th Street and transformed it into something thriving: the largest youth-run urban farm in New York City for the past six years, bringing the possibility of fresh produce — and therefore healthy food — to a community where such offerings were a rarity. 
But RYTF grows more than good greens. Its organizers pride themselves on helping young people grow into the kind of leaders who actually better their communities. 
In 2013, the group became a nonprofit and grew to expand its focus into four core areas: food justice, educational equity, criminal justice reform and civic engagement. Those core areas extended out into hosting campaigns around voter registration, lobbying for restorative justice practices in schools and organizing Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the city. 
Among its accomplishments was the successful campaign to extend the Q52 bus line 18 blocks east. This gave over 10,000 more residents access to the route, and therefore, access to jobs, schools and resources.
 
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Young people across Rockaway can join the task force by going through a 12-week course on the history of organized movements and basics of movement building. Then they get to work: The members attend community council meetings, lead rallies and organize protests. 
Colon said other communities can and should create similar groups so young people’s voices can be heard. 
“All these issues impact young people,” Colon said. “This is the world that we’re going to be living in for quite a while, so our voices should be validated and we should be given a seat at the table.”
RYTF was founded by the simple model of finding a problem, rallying people together and creating change. Its website provides an in-depth look at how the group approaches issues and theory of change. It’s a model that communities across the nation can adapt to their own unique neighborhoods. Colon’s advice is to get people together and act — or else. 
“We’re going to be the ones either suffering from the consequences or reaping the benefits,” she warned.
More: Brooklyn Middle Schoolers Are Launching Homemade Boats to Test Their Stem Skills
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrea Colon is 22 and joined the task for in 2015. She is 18 and joined in 2016. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.

From Fatal Shots to Garden Plots: These Guns Are Given New Meaning

The gun that killed Tom Miller sat locked in an antique chest for 47 years, stashed underneath police reports, crime photos and autopsy documents from the homicide case.
“It’s the sort of thing where you know it’s there… but you don’t know what to do with it,” Stephen Miller, Tom’s brother, told NationSwell.
The gun lay undisturbed for nearly five decades — out of sight, but never really out of mind — until Miller, now 62, cleaned out his childhood home. And with his mother focused on her transition into an assisted living center, it fell to Miller to decide what to do with it.
In the United States, there are limited options to dispose of unwanted firearms. Some police departments host gun buybacks, where people can bring weapons in exchange for cash. Other police departments will always accept people’s guns, no questions asked. But Miller didn’t necessarily want to give the gun away, despite the tragedy it brought into his family’s life. He suspected the weapon might find greater purpose beyond the reason it was built.
“I still want to have that connection to what happened,” he said. “But I want it to be turned towards positive action.”
And so, rather than dispose of the weapon through a police-sponsored program, Miller found his way to RAWtools, a faith-based gun nonviolence nonprofit that helps families like his recycle unwanted firearms. With their help, the gun that killed Tom Miller — a gun that brought so much anguish into the lives of Stephen and his family — will help something beautiful bloom. Literally.
Swords to Plowshares, the RAWtools program working to repurpose Miller’s weapon, draws its name from a notable verse from the Old Testament that says world peace is only possible when weapons are transformed into farming tools. Inspired by that passage, Swords to Plowshares breaks down unwanted guns and turns them into garden tools. It’s seen AR-15s become spades, AK-47s morph into plows and gun barrels experience new life as mattocks, hoes and trowels.
Mike Martin, executive director of the organization, cited the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 as the reason he took action to help end gun violence.
“It feels productive to be able to take something that was designed to take life and turn it into something that can give life,” Martin said of Swords to Plowshares’ methods.

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Each gun can be shaped into multiple tools. Many of the tools end up in community gardens.

In the United States, white Christians have one of the highest rates of gun ownership. Forty-one percent of white evangelicals and 33 percent of white protestant mainliners reported owning a gun, compared to the national gun ownership average of 30 percent. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans claim safety as the number one reason for gun ownership. But in October 2017, Scientific American cited dozens of studies that show the exact opposite is true: more guns actually lead to more violent crime, not less.
Martin, a former pastor, said he’s not there to judge his fellow Christians — rather, he hopes to use his organization to start a conversation that might change the narrative on gun ownership.
“It’s hard to carry a gun in one hand and a cross in the other,” he told NationSwell. “So we ask questions and we have a meaningful dialogue about that.”
Martin’s organization hosts events where gun violence survivors and allies meet in church parking lots to repurpose former weapons. As guns are sawed, metal sparks; so do conversations. People of all faiths — or no faith at all — are welcome to take part.
Here’s what those participating may see: a human whose life was impacted by gun violence speaks to their experience while a donated gun is disarmed. The weapon is heated thousands of degrees until the metal glows, signaling that it’s hot enough to reshape. Anyone impacted by gun violence can take a turn hitting the heated gun barrel against an anvil to begin its reshaping process.
A mother might strike the weapon 18 times to remember her 18-year-old child who died from suicide. Or a student might hit it in memory of a lost friend and classmate. Most recently, the barrel was struck in memory of the at least 50 victims who lost their lives in the March mass shooting at Christchurch in New Zealand.
After this shared ritual, the metal will be reforged into garden tools. Some of those tools end up in the homes of people who donated guns. Others will find their way to community gardens. The rest are sold to support RAWtools’ mission, with some of the proceeds helping the organization expand its outreach and create a national disarming network where people can bring a gun to be disarmed and donated.

“There’s a lot of grief, but there’s also something that happens at the anvil that pivots it towards hope,” Martin said. “We know that there’s a way out of it.”
For people who have experienced emotional and spiritual pain, there is powerful alchemy in welding together the symbolic and the literal. Though the organization doesn’t always do this, RAWTools set aside some of the pieces of the gun that killed Tom Miller to be reforged into a cross, a holy symbol from Miller’s faith emblematic of the church, the divine and the possibility of hope and healing from death.
Unlike the gun, that cross won’t be locked away for decades. Miller said he plans to carry it with him everywhere he goes.
More: 4 Low-Lift Ways You Can Help Fight Gun Violence

The Charismatic Gardener Whose Giving Is Inspiring Future Community Activists

When Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx, learned that she was the recipient of the $10,000 AllStar prize, she was dumbfounded. Her mouth hung open in shock. Oversized check in hand from NationSwell and NBCUniversal, Washington stood onstage in silence, a rare moment of speechlessness from a charismatic storyteller.
Now that a month’s passed, NationSwell caught up with Washington to discuss that emotional moment and her future plans. Washington has already doled out some of the funds in New York City’s poorest borough and hopes her giving will inspire more donors to step forward to help her match the prize and start a community foundation that will back other local activists.
Looking back to the NationSwell Summit in early November, Washington thought she had no chance of winning. “Here I am 61 years of age, and I’m with a younger generation who knew all about social media, and this competition was all about social media,” she says. Her strategy to get online votes? “The only thing I can do is tell my story,” she says, and mobilize folks with some good, old-fashioned word-of-mouth organizing.
After her name was announced, Washington was “just so overwhelmed with emotion,” she says, her voice cracking into a restrained sob. “I guess I never knew how much I was really loved. I never knew how far-reaching it was, the impact that I had on so many people across the world that took the time to vote for me. And that’s when it hit me, right then and there.”
Inspired by that outpouring of love, Washington is sending that affection back to her neighborhood. Already, she’s given money to a community garden to help build a retaining wall, funded an apprenticeship program at a farm and group for young men of color, paid the funeral expenses for a farm school student who died suddenly and contributed to a legal defense fund for black farmers threatened by foreclosure.
Her aim is not to fund big projects that other nonprofits are already working on. Instead, Washington wants to help community activists who can’t get grants elsewhere. She’s looking for the locals who don’t make the headlines — the ones whose operation is too small to have a full-time grant-writer.
Washington is keeping diligent notes about each dollar to track how her impact magnifies. She isn’t asking for anything back, but the money does come with one condition: As soon as the person has a few extra bucks, she asks that he or she pass along the surplus to another activist in need.
As soon her name was announced, Washington thought to herself, “You know what? I won for a reason.” But then she corrected herself. “No, we,” she said. Her family, her gardening friends and fellow farmers, her community. “We won for a reason.”
WATCH: See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman 
Homepage photo courtesy of Karen Washington.