The PHS Love Where You Live greening plan is the product of The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s community-driven work to articulate a green vision for North Philadelphia’s Nicetown and Tioga neighborhoods that is rooted in the aspirations of community members of this neighborhood. This historic, predominantly black and brown neighborhood has suffered decades of disinvestment leading to increased rates of crime, unemployment, poverty, and environmental injustices.
PHS, with input from neighborhood residents, and local community-based organizations, Nicetown CDC (Community Development Corporation) and Tioga United, articulated horticulturally driven strategies to tackle the neighborhood challenges identified by residents including trash and litter, lack of access to fresh, healthy food, crime, and lack of job opportunities. These strategies included cleaning and greening all eligible vacant lots, training and placing neighborhood residents in green jobs, restoring neighborhood tree canopy, mobilizing neighbors and businesses to increase access to fresh food, and supporting residents to garden and beautify their blocks. Prior research has proven that these strategies contribute both to the neighborhood’s defined goals and to other physical health, mental health, community well-being, and environmental outcomes. Through this program, PHS also set out to create a new model of delivering its greening tools with a place-based focus that directly combats environmental inequity at the neighborhood level.
Plan of Action:
PHS’s work in Nicetown and Tioga delivers simple, low-cost greening solutions to urban and green challenges identified through numerous conversations with community residents. Through the usage of a community- led approach that centered the needs and aspirations of residents, PHS and the community identified the following horticulturally driven strategies to address these challenges:
Clean and Green all eligible vacant lots
Train and place neighborhood residents in Green Jobs
Restore Tree Canopy
Mobilize Neighbors and Businesses to Increase Access to Fresh, Healthy Food
Support Residents to garden and beautify their blocks
Execution:
These needs in Nicetown and Tioga challenged PHS to work in new ways to carefully design projects that build on the organization and a specific neighborhood’s strengths, while addressing the needs and aspirations of the community to significantly improve their environment and sustainability, health, and quality of life. This new model leverages PHS’s decades of experience with community greening using culturally appropriate strategies and strong networks of neighborhood partners.
In addition, rather than presenting single-action greening tools (planting trees, supporting community gardens, or vacant land cleaning and greening) for one-off use, the new approach relies on a unified, data-driven greening model to support Nicetown and Tioga neighbors to drive big changes they envision, by connecting community groups with layers of technical assistance, materials, infrastructure, volunteers, and partners needed to realize their goals of using greening to transform their neighborhood and promote sustainability in the long-term.
To successfully deliver these green interventions, PHS was challenged to develop trust and buy-in for the program from a historically disinvested, primarily BIPOC community, and needed to clearly establish the goals of the program as being community-driven and long-term commitments, rather than a one-time intervention. Building this trust began with a community-first approach that surveyed over 400 residents on the green changes they envisioned for their communities, as well as held forums to discuss how PHS could support delivering on the community’s vision through its greening programs. At every step in the program’s journey, PHS has continued to work closely with community members to track progress and ensure their vision remains central to the program’s operation.
Key Features:
In addition to the above greening strategies, PHS also wanted to test run a community-led plan to build social ties through gardening. To do so, PHS created the Front Porch Challenge, where interested residents could sign up to receive a free gardening kit from PHS including plants, pots, soil, tools, and other materials needed to garden their front stoops or porches. In the program’s second year, participation in the Front Porch Challenge more than doubled, with the test block having 100% participation. As part of the Challenge, PHS judges issue awards recognizing the creativity and design skill of resident’s gardens. All these initiatives enacted by PHS contributed to delivering upon the community’s green vision for their neighborhood and created lasting impact through rectifying environmental inequity and fostering deeper social connection among neighbors.
In the program’s first 2 years of operation, over 1.19 million square feet of vacant land in Nicetown and Tioga has been cleaned, greened, and maintained, over 300 trees have been planted, 55 raised beds have been created at 6 community grow sites, and 2,772 daily green jobs have been created, with 33 residents participating in green jobs training. Additionally, from year 1 to year 2, PHS more than doubled the number of residents who beautified their block as part of the Love Where You Live Front Porch Challenge, with over 60 residents (an entire neighborhood block) participating.
The Love Where You Live program has also delivered 23 gardening educational workshops to community gardeners and youth educators via its Green City Teachers and Garden Tenders programs. Additionally, PHS launched significant infrastructure improvements as part of Love Where You Live and invested $42K into equipment and infrastructure upgrades. Recent examples include the construction of a new walking path at a local community garden, and a “garden makeover” that revitalized an old garden with 16 new raised beds and an orchard to be planted this Fall.
These results are considered a success because they demonstrate significant progress in achieving the green vision of this community as delineated by the Love Where You Live program’s 3 Year Greening Plan.
Moving into the program’s third year of operation, PHS hopes to continue to expand its efforts and further engage the Nicetown and Tioga community as stewards of positive environmental change.
