Alongside the glinting waves and pristine beachfront property, a surge of talent is transforming Miami into a tech hub.
The Kauffman Index rated the metropolitan area of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach as the number one entrepreneurial area in America, and international tech startups are using the city for its geographic proximity to Latin America.
But in Broward County, just north of the white sands of Miami Beach, there’s a stark reality for the youth of color: They don’t have access to technology or entrepreneurial leaders the same way that some of their well-to-do peers do.
“In areas of high growth in the tech and entrepreneurial or small business sector, [minority] populations are completely left out of that activity,” says Felecia Hatcher-Pearson, co-founder of Code Fever Miami. “If you have an idea, oftentimes you have to leave your neighborhood in order to execute on that idea or get the right resources in order to make that happen. And that’s a problem.”
Hatcher-Pearson’s organization is bridging that digital divide — which she refers to as an “innovation desert” — by providing opportunities to young teens of color in coding lessons and pitching business startup ideas.
Since 2013, Code Fever has introduced more than 3,000 youth and adults to the tech ecosystem. It’s also served as host to more than 100 tech events, including boot camps and hack-a-thons.
This isn’t Hatcher-Pearson’s first attempt at bringing entrepreneurship to youth. After losing her marketing job at Nintendo in 2008 when the financial crisis hit, she moved back into her parent’s Florida home and opened an ice cream and popsicle stand in Broward County. She noticed that the kids in the community looked up to moneymakers: those selling drugs.
“Sometimes the first way [these kids] get introduced to entrepreneurship in their neighborhoods when they live in impoverished neighborhoods, it’s the guy that’s selling on the block, right? And if he’s successful, he’s getting a mentor, like someone showing him how to do it,” she says.
Hatcher-Pearson began pairing teens with entrepreneurs to learn how to market and sell sweets using extra stands she had laying around.
“We know what happens when young people can’t get their first jobs or don’t learn the basic skills on how to be self-sustainable, the entire cycle of poverty continues,” she says.
As Miami’s tech scene started taking off in 2010, Hatcher-Pearson recognized a similar lack of entrepreneurial mentorship.
“It wasn’t inclusive,” says Hatcher-Pearson, referring to the tech scene in Miami. “It didn’t include the black community or the Caribbean community in any of the activity, the resources, the programming or any of the spaces.”
With the help of her husband, Derek, the two started Code Fever.
The organization’s reputation is built on its ability to foster African American tech talent through its Black Tech Week. The summit provides multiple pitch opportunities to help finance burgeoning startups, class intensives geared toward making older generations more digitally native and education for teachers on how to bring in more technology into the classroom — a massive hindrance for students, Hatcher says.
“Oftentimes, their teachers don’t have the right tech training or tech confidence, and they’re the ones that are not doing a good job of allowing technology to be in the classroom,” Hatcher-Pearson says.
Ryan Hall, who heads the curriculum for Code Fever and Black Tech Week, says that based on his own personal experience, the role the organization plays in students’ lives is essential.
“I personally found that I was in a lot of these tech spaces, and I didn’t see a lot of people who look like me,” Hall says. “We care about taking people who are minorities and bringing them into the technology economy, because it has the ability to raise people out of their socioeconomic situation.”
Both Hatcher-Pearson and Hall attribute the program’s success to its ability to allow kids of color to integrate their own personal lifestyles and interests into coding. Code Fever accomplishes this by bringing in local black celebrities and creating hybrid projects that merge music and tech or sports and tech.
“Culture plays a major role in introducing students to [science, technology, engineering or math] fields,” says Hatcher-Pearson. “We have to introduce them to computer programming because… the current narrative is that the black and brown community doesn’t exist in tech, and we are pioneers in tech and innovation.”
The 2017 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
Correction: A previous version of this video stated that Miami is the birthplace of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He was born in Albuquerque, N.M. NationSwell apologizes for this error.
[button url=”http://nationswell4.wpengine.com/tech-impact-allstars-2017/#vote-now-for-your-favorite-tech-impact-allstar” ]Vote for Felecia Now![/button]
Tag: Miami
10 Infrastructure Projects We’d Like to See Get Off the Ground
In his victory speech, Donald J. Trump vowed to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” The investment is long overdue: The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent national assessment, rated the country’s infrastructure as a D-plus, just above failing. The group estimates that, by 2025, the nation will need a $1.44 trillion boost over current funding levels to meet growing needs.
Since 2009, when Barack Obama doled out roughly $800 billion in a stimulus package, that money’s been hard to come by, largely blocked by partisanship. But advocates hope the election of Trump, who made his fortune in real estate, could launch a building boom. The Republican president, so used to seeing his name on gilded skyscrapers, hotels, casinos and golf courses, could cut a deal with congressional Democrats, who view public-works projects as an engine for job growth.
Assuming Trump can indeed pass a bill, we at NationSwell have a few ideas for him to consider. A big, beautiful wall’s not one of them; instead, here’s the top 10 shovel-worthy alternatives we’d like the new administration to undertake.
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Continue reading “10 Infrastructure Projects We’d Like to See Get Off the Ground”
The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America
After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Forget South Beach. This Urban Park Is Going to Be Miami’s Top Spot to Get Fresh Air
South Florida will soon have its very own version of New York City’s famed High Line. The southern counterpart’s co-creators are calling their idea “The Underline,” a stretch of urban parkland underneath an elevated train’s railway in Miami.
Led by Meg Daly, a businesswoman who first reimagined the transit corridor’s possibilities after a debilitating accident, The Underline will transform a barren swath of land into safer paths for pedestrians and bicyclists — from the Miami River in the north to the city’s South Station. James Corner Field Operations, the same New York City-based firm behind the High Line, is sketching early blueprints and expects to present plans this September.
The genesis for this huge public works project occurred when Daly was out for a bike ride with her adult daughter. The pair collided, and Daly hit the asphalt elbows first and broke both bones. (The pain was “terrible,” she says, “but I’ve been through childbirth, so whatever.”) For all practical purposes, Daly was incapacitated — unable to drive for three months while both arms healed. So she started traveling on the city’s Metrorail, an elevated train.
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“I took it from one stop to another, and on the final stretch, I’d walk under under the train tracks to grab some shade because June and July in Miami are really hot. It was at that moment I realized there’s so much land here, and there’s really not a whole lot being done with it. This should be like the High Line in New York,” she recalls. “That’s really where the idea came from. It was a crazy idea, and I started telling my friends and family. My background’s in marketing, so I’m used to hearing a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’ but they all agreed it should be a park.”
From end to end, the park will stretch 10 linear miles. Under the tracks, the corridor exceeds 110 feet in width in some spots. (Compare that to 30 feet on the High Line.) One side parallels U.S. Route 1; the other faces building facades.
Today, there’s a crude, narrow path that some frequent, but mostly the space looks how you’d expect a rail yard to appear — utility poles, maintenance ladders, fences (and holes to sneak in) and encroachments from adjacent property owners. “There’s really bad signaling, and it doesn’t have lighting at night. Not a lot of people use it,” says Isabel Castilla, senior associate at James Corner Field Operations.
Although it’s underdeveloped, the passage still radiates potential. Its shade provides a refuge from the Florida humidity, and the patterns of light through the rails roughly three stories above create a dazzling chiaroscuro display — an effect that’s accentuated by pedaling on a bike at a constant rhythm.
This fall, James Corner’s team will present initial renderings for pilot projects downtown and near the University of Miami — two locations where people are “clamoring” for open space, Daly says. At one end of the line, construction of high rises in the central business district is encroaching on limited greenery; at the other, college students can feel disconnected from the town across the train tracks and are actively looking for new recreation opportunities. Neighbors abutting the line are planning out their own use for the space, too. South Miami Hospital, for example, is planning to pull back the pavement on a parking lot and introduce a meditation garden for patients.
Like Gotham’s version, the artery will connect disparate neighborhoods. Designers from James Corner Field Operations will unite the entire passage with native flora and tailor each block to residents’ needs. Columns supporting the tracks above, for example, might become a canvas for local artists in West Grove, a bohemian neighborhood, Castilla says.
But for all its specificity, the most important idea is that the line will be available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomics. “Anyone who lives along a transit line will now be able to come here and walk this, then go back home and never need a car,” Daly says.
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Compared to New York’s undertaking, Miami’s project must also fit more practical needs. “We’re the fourth most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians, and [one of] the most dangerous in the state for bicyclists. We don’t have protected infrastructure,” Daly says. The Underline will function as an “off-road safe haven” running parallel to the region’s busiest highway: U.S. Route 1, she adds. The project’s architects believe the new transit infrastructure won’t only protect pedestrians; they hope the newly landscaped paths, in sight of disgruntled motorists in gridlock, will be a “catalyst” for encouraging alternative modes of transit.
“Everyone hits their head and says, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’” Daly says. “When I was forced to not drive and walk where I wanted to go, I had this new lens… It’s big, it’s shady. There’s an opportunity here. It’s all because I had never walked underneath it before.”
Many grassroots revitalization efforts have started with an ingenious idea like Daly’s, only to languish in the bureaucracy of City Hall. To the visionary, permits, zoning ordinances and public meetings can be a slow and painful death. A “champion” in Miami-Dade County’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces department, Maria Nardi, chief of planning, “a bureaucrat who thinks like an entrepreneur,” propelled the idea forward as the “glue that held future trails together,” Daly says.
No small force to be discounted herself, Daly often talks about bringing private sector speed to government. She sets ambitious goals for The Underline’s construction, but knows she’ll meet them. Overtures made to three municipalities and four nonprofits produced an “unusual collaboration”; altogether, they contributed $500,000 to get planning underway. Again, valuing speed, Friends of the Underline’s planning committee chose James Corner as the lead design team. “The way we’re railroading this thing” — pun intended — “we didn’t have the time to have anybody go through a learning curve. [James Corner] brought that expertise.”
There’s still some practical elements for the firm to work out — designing safe passageways at intersections, getting approval from the Federal Transit Authority, finding the money to make everything possible — but Daly seems positive that the entire line will be completed in six years.
“You know what motivates me? That it can be done; it just isn’t being done. The way the public sector moves needs to be challenged. Development is moving much faster than infrastructure to match it,” Daly says. “The people who live here deserve this. And I want to be sure to use this before I’m in a wheelchair.”
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The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink
In Liberty City, a predominantly black neighborhood northwest of Miami’s central business district that’s been devastated by a century of misguided urban policies, is a patch of green. It’s almost something out of a storybook, this community garden: A group of hardwood trees (known to ecologists as a hammock) where the branches are weighed down with plump tropical fruits and swarms of butterflies dance about.
It’s all the more surreal given the contrast with the landscape surrounding. When NationSwell spoke with Roger Horne, director of community health relations for Urban Greenworks, in early June, a 10-year-old boy had just been shot six blocks away at the Liberty Square Community Center, a popular local hangout where kids play basketball. The boy survived, but the bullet remains lodged in his left calf, and he needs a walker to move. “I thank God he ain’t dead, that God gave him a chance … again, you know, a second chance in life,” his mother tells the Miami Herald.
Urban Greenworks isn’t waiting around for second chances. Using the simple act of gardening, the Miami nonprofit is bettering this down-and-out community. As we detailed in the first part of this series, the group fosters as much life in its gardeners — at-risk teens from low-income neighborhoods, youth remanded from drug court to rehab and prisoners in the municipal jails — as in the flora it’s tending. But the plants’ actual fruit is equally important to Urban Greenworks’s mission. In Liberty City, Horne and his colleague James Jiler are promoting access to fresh and healthy produce in a “food desert,” by growing vegetation in neglected lots and tending to an urban forest — all while giving jobs to the neighborhood’s underserved population.
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Educated at Cornell University and Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school, Horne, just like Jiler, came to Miami from New York City (Brooklyn, to be exact). Since he’s been in the palm-tree city, Horne served as community liaison or board member for any and all groups working to help Liberty City’s youth: the Miami Mayor’s Youth Council, the public school’s student advisory board, the city’s urban forestry committee, the Urban Environmental League of Greater Miami, the Consortium for a Healthier Miami-Dade and and the Circle of Brotherhood, a black male empowerment group. While all that’s major resume fodder, Horne’s not out to pad his credentials or garner publicity. (In fact, it took NationSwell days of attempts before Horne found a free minute to talk.) He does the work because he cares about the neighborhood kids and their future.
Horne’s also an inventor of sorts. He likes testing out new models, molding them until they’re bearing fruit (so to speak), then sharing what he’s learned. “One of the things that we always tell the kids that we work with is, ‘You have to adapt. If something doesn’t work this year, don’t be afraid to change it next time,’” Horne says.
Two of his signature initiatives include setting up a farmers market that’s actually affordable to residents — all $1 for each bundle, not the inflated prices that Whole Foods and other corporations have conflated with the term “organic” — and Hammocks in Da Hood, a program to restore native trees in underutilized lots. His latest idea, still in the works, involves urban aquaculture and mariculture, raising tilapia in two 1,600-gallon aquaponic tanks at a local high school.
“Folks often talk about feeding the community, but they think there’s only one way to feed them,” Horne says, which is why Urban Greenworks is training people to breed and raise fish. “If you have enough of the community doing it, you can feed more people and create an income source from selling large tilapia online if you grow it in volume.”
Liberty City has one of the largest concentration of African-Americans in South Florida. As with other formerly-segregated cities like Baltimore, it’s a section of Miami that began as an enclave of black culture, the “Harlem of the South.” Because middle-class African-Americans shared Miami’s northwest quarter with low-income minorities, a plethora of well-regarded institutions — from nightclubs to churches — popped up alongside shacks that provided poor living conditions to impoverished blacks. First known as Colored Town and later renamed Overtown, the teeming neighborhood once composed as much as 40 percent of Miami’s population.
The area got its start as federally designated overflow for Overtown, when white business leaders wanted to expand downtown’s footprint. In 1937, Liberty Square, a New Deal-funded public housing project, opened five miles farther north of downtown. “It’s a pretty hardscrabble street. The project is a series of one-story long rowhouses, all attached and set in squares,” Jiler describes. Redlining and racism kept black residents stuck in the quarter, eventually leading to Miami being the most segregated of the largest metropolises in 1940, 1950 and again in 1960. By the time an expressway sundered Overtown, displacing nearly 20,000 residents, the neighborhood had long fallen into physical disarray. Not surprisingly, it’s where riots broke out in 1980 when three policemen were acquitted (by an all-white jury) in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a prominent African-American businessman.
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Today, ask some local government officials to point out Liberty City on a map of Miami, and it’s likely that they’ll scratch their heads. And don’t expect to find it on any official map of Miami, either. City bureaucrats still refer to it as Model City, after its signature housing projects. Only the residents call their home Liberty City; they’re some of the only ones that identify it as a place of possibility and freedom.
Sadly, the others who foresee a vibrant future for the neighborhood are those who could change it irrevocably. In land grabs, developers could clear out blocks of residents to make room for swanky, amenity-stocked condominiums. Miami’s growing rapidly, and this historically black community will likely see new demographics. “Liberty City is five minutes from downtown, five minutes from the arena where the Miami Heat play, five minutes from the port, the largest port on the East Coast,” Jiler explains. “There’s new businesses, people are buying into it. It’s a neighborhood in transition.”
In the meantime, Horne believes the gardens are rebuilding the rooted tendrils that hold the troubled neighborhood together. Last spring, he expanded Cerasee Farms, the group’s ground zero for urban farming, across the street to another blighted lot. By October, nearly 100 seventh-graders constructed 20 planting beds with cinderblocks, doubling the farm’s production.
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The farmers’ market has more sellers than ever before, and it’s finally gained the permits required by the city. (Municipal funding, however, is a different story.) “When Roger and I first had a farmers’ market in Liberty City, the city [of Miami] came and closed us down. There was no permitting, and there was no process for this kind of open-air market anyway. There was no zoning for music, drumming, food being sold, and different vendors and kids,” Jiler says. “Three blocks away, we saw helicopters flying. Two cops had been shot and killed. Meanwhile, they’re shutting us down while we’re doing something positive for the community.”
Horne has since worked extensively to change the city’s ordinances so these kind of open markets can be held on a regular basis. The latest idea from Horne involves the market lowering its prices by subsidizing other farmers’ produce with money from subscription buyers (CSAs) outside of the neighborhood and actual crops harvested on Urban Greenworks plots, like tomatoes, corn, okra, four kinds of kale, two kinds of cabbage, spinach and broccoli.
“Most of the stuff people are buying at WalMart or Winn-Dixie… is colorless. White, brown, orange — never really anything green. Our plates aren’t colorful, and the nutrients come from the colors on your plate,” Horne says. “The idea is to show folks how food tastes when you grow it. We show it’s not hard to buy organic. We try to make it affordable for them so they’re not afraid to try [cooking] it and mess up.”
The Hammocks In Da Hood program, too, is offering Liberty City residents the same amenities you’d find in Miami’s wealthier areas. “When you look at global warming and the disparity in wealth between communities, it’s usually the canopy that matters. The wealthy neighborhoods in Miami like Coral Gables have one. In Liberty City, there’s no canopy, no shade, no trees,” Jiler says. “Our idea is to raise the canopy in Miami with edible fruit trees and native trees. The hammocks have largely been destroyed in Miami for redevelopment and replaced by inexotic, institutional and industrial land. We’re carving out our niche and recreating a native landscape for the marginalized in society.”
Starting young, Urban Greenworks is teaching Liberty City’s youth sustainability and self-reliance, while also rejuvenating the century-old projects. With greenery returned to its public spaces, the land is finally living up to its name: a free city and a model one.
“The people of Liberty City have been starting to fight for their rights. [Gentrification] is coming, and they see it coming. They see the developers and the vision for Miami. Some of it will be lost, the community is starting to be taken away. I’m very optimistic the community will keep some of the current things going,” Horne says. “Regardless of all the violence that happens on a daily basis, we’re still a neighborhood and we’re still a community. I hope it doesn’t lose that.”
READ MORE: What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
Passion fruit vines cling to a chainlink fence surrounding a lush oasis of fruit trees, vegetable planters and palms in the midst of inner-city Miami. The garden, Cerasee Farm, is a project of Urban Greenworks, a Miami-based nonprofit using agriculture to bring opportunity and healthy food to underprivileged communities. Named for a medicinal Caribbean vine that sprouts wherever land is disturbed, Cerasee is just one of many projects started by the organization since it was founded in 2010.
Read more about Urban Greenworks here and here.
Photos by Ryan Stone for NationSwell.
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What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism
It’s mango season in Miami, and James Jiler’s kitchen counter keeps filling with bags and bags of the tropical fruit. The towering mound accumulates nearly faster than he can slice the mangos apart or blend them together in a summer daiquiri.
Tasty as the fresh fruit is already, it’s even sweeter to Jiler because of where it comes from: many of the mangoes were nurtured and picked by at-risk youth, halfway house residents and the formerly incarcerated. As the executive director of Urban Greenworks, Jiler provides green jobs and environmental programs like planting in urban spaces or science education in schools to troubled residents of Miami. Since the organization’s start in 2010, roughly 55 people have been employed by the nonprofit, plus hundreds more have served as volunteers.
“Every time we plant a cluster of native trees, we create a little, cool sanctuary, or a butterfly garden or a natural habitat for the endangered Dade pine that was once there 150 years ago,” Jiler says. “My philosophy is to change one person, one garden, one community at a time.”
Before he arrived on the southeast tip of Florida, Jiler lived in New York’s East Village for more than a decade. He spent his time organizing with his neighbors to protect several community gardens — precious land in dense Lower Manhattan — from the dual threats of gentrification and former mayor Rudy Giuliani. He spent his days heading up the GreenHouse Program, a “jail to street” program at Rikers Island, the city’s central corrections facility, where he taught male and female prisoners “the art of gardening” on two acres of land adjacent to the penitentiary. Schooled in the methods of tending plants from seed to blossom, the formerly incarcerated left “immediately employable,” Jiler says. They could quickly transition to jobs in the city’s parks department or nature conservancies. Some alums even found themselves potting flowerbeds at spacious penthouse terraces, overlooking skyscrapers and the great emerald of Central Park.
“I would say, of close to 700 inmates I worked with over 10 years, I could count on my hands the ones that had a college education and on my hands and feet the ones that graduated high school. The rank and file of incarcerated in our cities are undereducated, underemployed and generally poor,” explains Jiler, who completed a graduate program at Yale University’s School of Forestry. “Using horticulture and gardening and food production, we’d redirect their lives. It’s a way to develop vocational skills and educate. When the real difficulties begin, it’s a way to reduce recidivism.”
Not only did gardening provide the incarcerated with work, its rhythms and routines could soothe tensions and relieve anxiety by troweling the earth. “It’s horticulture as therapy,” Jiler explains. “People’s lives could be transformed having these positive interactions with nature.” If a convict needed to confront the old buddies that once got him into trouble, for example, the rote actions of pruning could be meditative, could prove that small and painful incisions do eventually beautify the whole.
“I like to see beauty. What gets me going is to see a garden made by people in that community who have been marginalized, who are considered unemployable, involved in something productive and meaningful,” Jiler says.
In 2008, Jiler packed up from his New York neighborhood, feeling it had lost its edge, and journeyed south to Miami. He thought his work in the penal system had been effective, but he started to wonder if it was possible to bust what he calls the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” at an earlier stage. In Liberty City, “one of the most neglected inner-city neighborhoods in Miami,” Jiler found the Belafonte TACOLCY Center, a community youth center, and a partner with whom to launch a green initiative. Roger Horne, a naturalist who’d co-founded Youth Bike, a program teaching mechanical skills and safety to inner-city kids, and taught gardening at the center, now heads Urban Greenworks’s community health relations.
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At their newly formed organization, Jiler and Horne created Cerasee Farm. It’s named for a tropical vine in the Caribbean that sprouts wherever the land is disturbed and produces seed pods used in medicinal teas — just the antidote the pair believed Liberty City needed. Over the course of a year, the nonprofit’s employees and volunteers transformed an abandoned tract of land into a huge urban farm. They grow moringas, a tree that sprouts healthy superfood, and mulberries, a tree that shoots up quickly and produces fruit within eight months. Higher up in the canopy, there’s avocados and lychees.
In August 2013, Jiler also established the Mustard Seed Project, creating an urban farm of kale, arugula and cranberry hibiscus at the halfway home Agape House, where women reside post-incarceration. Almost all have a history of substance abuse, and a number have suffered as victims of human trafficking. Women from the facility also run the Edible Wall, 400 square feet of fresh herbs and fruits, like peppermint and spearmint, cilantro, basil, passion fruit and strawberries, that supply downtown’s trendy mixologists and chefs.
“I look forward to each day so much: we get to be outside with nature and get our hands dirty,” one woman says of the program. “I used to hate going outside, but now I love to with all the plants and flowers — so much life.” Another adds, “It’s great to be part of something beautiful for a change.”
It’s said that weeds are nothing more than unloved flowers — a lesson that holds true for gardeners, too. No matter if they’re wild, bent or misshapen, Jiler accepts Liberty City’s inmates, addicts and youth — the people that others would uproot and toss aside. Some may not look rosy today, but with a little care, they’ll be like late-spring blossoms, all the more beautiful for the wait.
READ MORE: The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
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5 Gorgeous New High-Speed Rail Stations Coming to the U.S.
Chances are, if you’re fond of traveling you’ve probably wondered why high-speed trains have existed in Europe and Asia for years, yet they’re non-existent here in the United States.
But the reality of a high-speed rail network is edging closer and closer. As Gizmodo reports, cities have already begun planning — and in some cases, already building — new stations in five cities across America. These stations will combine the old elegance of train travel with lightning fast speed — with the hope that in the future, these trains will be well used by passengers.
This year, Union Station in Los Angeles celebrates its 75th anniversary and with it comes a redesign. The plan includes stations for buses and trains plus a new subway system as well as bus, bike and pedestrian connections. Designed by Grimshaw Architects and Gruen Associates, the design also includes a high-speed rail terminal, as well as hotel and office towers, park land and better access to the neighborhoods surrounding the station and the nearby L.A. River.
Already under construction, the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco is going to be replaced by the new Transbay Transit Center — combining access to the Bay Area’s transit, including BART, Muni, and Caltrain, as well as accommodations for Amtrak trains and a possible high-speed rail. Cesar Pelli designed the new station — complete with a 5.4 acre public park on the roof — all of which are scheduled to open in 2017.
MORE: Thanks to Uncle Sam, Our Trains Are Finally Getting a Sweet Upgrade
Now that Denver’s new train station is complete, the Mile High city’s historic 1914 Union Station will become an area for shopping, restaurants and a boutique hotel. In turn, all modes of transit have been consolidated into this newly-designed spot, which also has room for offices and public space — all designed by SOM.
Down south, the first privately financed and run rail network in the U.S., All Aboard Florida, is invigorating its existing 235-mile railway, with plans to complete it by 2016. The train runs from Orlando to South Florida, ending in the brand-new hub designed by SOM that is planned for downtown Miami. Shopping and entertainment, plus a 80-story tower, will all be included in the complex.
Finally, Anaheim’s Regional Transportation Intermodal Center will open later this year, looking like a “translucent, glowing balloon” thanks to the ETFE polymer pillows. While the the improved local rail and bus connections help Orange County now, there are high hopes for California’s high-speed rail to begin here.
The City of Miami Steps Up For Its Homeless Service Members
Over Memorial Day weekend, the city of Miami put the phrase “thank you for your service” into action.
The Southern Florida city gathered hundreds of volunteers together in an effort to offer homeless service members a wealth of services during Operation Stand Down. The three-day event, which had 100 organizations participating (such as the City of Miami Veterans Services Department and the Florida Veterans Foundation), helped more than 200 veterans.
In a tent city on the property of an American Legion post, volunteers distributed clothing and performed medical and dental exams. Miami-Dade Judge Steve Leifman was on hand, running a court to resolve any outstanding minor infractions on the homeless vets’ records, such as petty theft or traffic violations. Showers, hot meals, and haircuts were also provided; homeless vets stayed on cots housed in the tends during the weekend.
Veteran Arthur Woods told Natalie Zea of CBS Miami, “It’s helping me out considerably as far as me getting my act together and a lot of things I don’t have due to the fact that I’m homeless…I need dental. I need some eyeglasses. I mostly need a place to stay and I need some income.”
The nonprofit Operation Sacred Trust even provided two of the homeless veterans with their own homes. Coast Guard veteran Gregory Lewis, one of the recipients, said he was “elated.”
“To open that door is gonna be great because it’s going to open other doors. I have two kids and four grandkids and they’ll be able to visit me. I’ll have a stable environment.”
MORE: Giving Homeless Vets A Helping Hand–And A New Uniform
When This Vet’s House Started to Crumble, Home Depot Stepped in with a $20,000 Renovation
Many of us have heard of the pervasive problem of homeless veterans, which the National Coalition for the Homeless estimates number between 130,000 and 200,000 on any given night. But what about vets who own homes, but due to disability or financial troubles, can’t afford to maintain them? Staff at the City of Miami Services Office became concerned about this issue and partnered with Home Depot to provide grants to renovate vets’ homes that badly need it.
The first to benefit from this program is Army veteran George Carswell. Disabled due to his service in Vietnam, Carswell lived with his mother Minnie Lee Spann in the home she purchased in 1964. Since her death, Carswell hasn’t had the funds to keep up with the maintenance, completing no significant repairs since 1978; the home was in danger of collapsing.
That’s when Home Depot stepped up and donated $20,000 to make the necessary improvements. Local Home Depot store manager Alberto Contreras even came out to work and personally oversee the renovation. “The house was in deplorable conditions and not livable,” Contreras told Carma Henry of the Westside Gazette. “If the house wasn’t repaired it would’ve been demolished.”
Not only did the volunteer workers stabilize the home, they beautified it, with new paint, windows, doors, sod, and a rose garden planted in the memory of Carswell’s mother.
The partnership between Miami’s Veterans Services Office and the Home Depot aims to help four more veterans with similar repairs this year. Miami mayor Thomas Regalado said, “My goal is to ensure that our Veterans are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. We are trying to get them the services they need.”
One way to reduce the number of homeless veterans is to prevent vets from becoming homeless in the first place, and the generous people behind this home repair effort in Miami are doing their best to achieve that.
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