Mean streets become meaningful streets as young people in New York City urban program work to bring change

Young people from the Growing Up in New York City program
Provided
Young people from the Growing Up in New York City program at Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School collect specimens for terrariums while on a field trip to Crotona Park in the South Bronx.

At 14, Lisette Lopez is learning how to bring changes to her Queens neighborhood.

Last summer, Lopez and other young people in the Cornell- and UNESCO-affiliated Growing Up in Cities (GUiC) program took action. They mapped their surroundings, conducted surveys and identified such local problems as an abundance of garbage, and successfully lobbied to have self-compacting trash cans installed in Jackson Heights. This year they are looking at other ways to improve their neighborhood.

Lopez, a youth leader in the program, is one of about 20 students participating in GUiC at the Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, in partnership with the Latin American Integration Center.

"During the school year, we were talking about immigration issues mainly, and we went to protests," Lopez says. "We went to Albany to make a presentation. And we worked with helping immigrants who need money for scholarships."

Cornell students play a significant part in the GUiC program by mentoring young people, ages 9-17, in self-directed community action projects that involve research and collective decision-making. Three Cornell undergraduates and three graduate students currently facilitate programs in partnership with local organizations at five sites citywide, collectively called the Growing Up in NYC project.

The neighborhood mapping projects were dubbed "Comin' From Where I'm From" by the GUiC team in Harlem. Young people identify the good and bad places in their neighborhoods, and the locations of parks, stores, schools and open spaces. The Harlem group made a short video on neighborhood gentrification last year. This summer, assisted by Andrea Finigan, a graduate student in the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, they are producing a full-length video, interviewing young people on what it is like to grow up in Harlem.

In the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, young people are addressing dilapidated housing and other issues, in partnership with the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment. Another community partner, Open Road of New York, designed, built and now manages a public park and garden on Manhattan's Lower East Side, runs a compost program and facilitates environmental projects throughout the city.

"Every site has its own character and focus," says David Driskell, a Cornell lecturer in city and regional planning and the UNESCO chair for GUiC. "The idea wasn't to create a uniform program, but to base it around a core set of principles, with each site making the project relevant to their local context. We put a lot of effort into creating ownership."

At Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School in the South Bronx, 17 young people in the GUiNYC program are working to establish a community garden on a vacant lot. They mapped the area last year and are now petitioning the neighborhood to support the garden, designing a mural and learning about ecology and local plant life as well as non-native species that could be grown for food there.

"Every element of every research project doesn't necessarily work at each site -- planning is really about listening," says Simone Greenbaum '08, a city and regional planning student assigned to the South Bronx site with Tony Marks-Block '07, a natural resources major with an interest in urban environments.

On a recent Thursday, Greenbaum, Marks-Block and Hamer art teacher Caryn Davidson led their charges on a field trip to the Bronx's Crotona Park. The group gathered plant and insect specimens for terrariums and took time out for a game of football. Fun and field trips are typically interspersed with learning and doing; at an "all-city" picnic in Central Park on July 12, about 100 young people from all five sites gathered to eat pizza and play games.

The New York City program continues through mid-August at the individual sites and will culminate in a citywide youth forum at City Hall in September and a visit to Cornell in October.

Cornell students gain experience

Cornell students are gaining hands-on experience in community-based research and action by working with New York City's young people in the Growing Up in Cities program (GUiC).

"It was the participatory action that was exciting to me -- the ability to engage a community," says Nischit Hegde '06, a Cornell graduate student working with youths in Queens, N.Y.

The intensive summer program is augmented by a spring course in the Department of City and Regional Planning and meetings once or twice per semester in New York with eight community partner organizations. During the summer, Cornell Urban Scholars Program (CUSP) field staff meets with GUiC's Cornell students and the program's high school-age leaders every two weeks.

"We're trying to cultivate a culture in which the kids themselves are in the driver's seat," says CUSP chair Kenneth Reardon, associate professor of city and regional planning. "It's a youth-empowerment model, designing solutions."

David Driskell, a Cornell city and regional planning lecturer and author of "Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth: A Manual for Participation" (UNESCO/Earthscan, 2002), helped launch GUiC in the mid-1990s and has organized sites in Bangalore, India, and Nairobi, Kenya; he became its chair in 2005.

"This is a rapidly growing field in terms of young people's participation in community development," Driskell says.

Some Cornell students go on to work at international GUiC sites. Simone Greenbaum '08 is going to Tokyo at the end of the summer. Other Cornell students are involved in organizing and facilitating new projects in Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Sarajevo and Manila. GUiC programs also are running in several U.S. and Canadian cities, including a fledgling project in Ithaca.

"For the students, it's an incredible learning experience that challenges them in ways they've never been challenged before," Driskell says. "It also challenges our partners to work with young people in new ways, and to bring a research perspective to their work. They all value being involved with something bigger than themselves, and working with Cornell and UNESCO; it ups the ante for them."

Media Contact

Media Relations Office