Southeast Community Development Corporation
This partnership is a strong example of a partner sending dedicated staff into the building and facilitating students doing community greening practices out in the community.
- 1.) The Community School Coordinator, Greg Couturier, is employed by the Southeast CDC, and co-leads the Green Team as a core component of his work plan (the Southeast CDC, through dialogue with the school administration, teachers, and parents determined that it was a top priority among school stakeholders to implement environmentally friendly practices in the building and, in so doing, to become a Maryland Certified Green School.
- 2.) The Southeast CDC has facilitated the students going out into the community to engage in an “adopt-a-lot” space on Eastern Avenue. This space, located in an alley alongside one of the businesses on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown, is currently made up of a strip of grass with a fair amount of trash and debris littering the area. The intent of the project is to reimagine the space, utilizing the large two-story wall adjacent to the grass area to highlight student artwork, as well as planting flowers and other plants in raised beds to give the space a more welcoming appearance. To kick off this work, the Green Team took a walking trip over to the space in October 2015 to conduct a visioning exercise and to introduce the students to the space. During this time, the students and #237 Green Team staff leaders met with Amanda Smit-Peters, the Main Streets Manager for the Southeast CDC. Ms. Smit-Peters has a small amount of grant funding that she has apportioned for this project, and led the students in an exercise directed at coming up with creative uses for the space. Photos of that day, and the student's ideas that they came up with on one of their visits to the lot, are shown below.
Patterson Park Audubon Center
This partnership helped our #237 Green Team learn about bird migratory patterns during two outdoor classroom sessions (show below), while also conducting two additional sessions to prep and plant the garden itself. Audubon sent three separate staff members to work with #237 during the course of this project, and has promised to continue to assist the Green Team in its stewardship of the space.