This past summer I was involved in an intense project involving the local communities of Hudson Hill and Woodville, Harambee House, Healthy Savannah, the Chatham Environmental Forum (CEF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Atlanta, Savannah Urban Garden Association (SUGA), and several other local efforts to promote environmental and social renewal. The class was comprised of eleven graduate students from many different fields of study.
Our client, Harambee House was granted $300,000 of EPA funding to combat the environmental and health risks plaguing these communities. Our job was to dive in and see what we could do to help. There was an unreal amount of information to parse through, so the structure of our team changed every few days. As new players entered the game we had to gauge their impact on the system and adapt. Our dynamic range of study and experience ensured that every time we reassembled ourselves we could pick up where others left off and maintain the consistency and effectiveness of previous deliverables.
This project was extremely complex and really dug down to the foundation of optimizing social organization and interaction. Both our goal and our strategy changed on a weekly basis, ever-simplifying as time went on. We began to see that in such a massive project the largest impact could be made by creating awareness of the many overlapping efforts and interests of different initiatives around town, then facilitating communication and partnerships between key players to make it all come together.
Concept map by Audrey Tan
Our goal was to create self-sustaining community gardens behind the community centers of these two neighborhoods. We demonstrated that after the gardens satisfied local demand for a fresh, accessible food supply the surplus could be moved into a number of different entrepreneurial ventures, such as community kitchens and mobile food trucks. However, as we eventually realized, imposing solutions (change) on any community is guaranteed to fall apart in flight and has the potential to repel would-be collaborators (including the communities themselves). As long as we focused on facilitating open, positive communication between the communities and the partners, the emergent creativity within this new network would respond appropriately to the opportunity to create positive change. Half of any conversation is to get folks to the table; the other half is to listen.
The most important part of the collaboration that occurred within our team and with other actors in the network was the opportunity to do something meaningful. All action is driven by meaning. Set a dozen students loose on an assignment and you'll get about as much effort as is required to get a passing grade. Set those same students loose on a project geared towards finding innovative ways to improve the lives of people in two disadvantaged, environmentally and economically exploited communities on the wrong side of the tracks, and you'll get the kind of personal investment from each of them that really makes good things happen.
Slick rendering by Ben Decherd
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