EARTH CELEBRATIONS REPORT 2019
ORGANIZATION: EARTH CELEBRATIONS NOTE NEW ADDRESS: 11 Fifth Avenue #5M, New York, NY 10003 (212) 777-7969 / 347-752-0854/ [email protected] http://www.earthcelebrations.com
CONTACT: Felicia Young, Founder/Director, Earth Celebrations
LOCATION: Lower East Side, New York City
PROJECT: EARTH CELEBRATIONS' ECOLOGICAL CITY: Creative Climate Solutions ______
EARTH CELEBRATIONS - Ecological City - Cultural & Climate Solutions Action Project REPORT 2019:
The Puffin Foundation West's grant of $465 covered expenses for the Ecological City: Creative Climate Solutions Project engaging gardeners, artists, organizations, schools, youth and residents of the Lower East Side of Manhattan through year-long creative engagement process with 106 sessions (including 51 public engagement workshops, meetings, artist/partner collaborative workshops and 25 rehearsal sessions) to create a theatrical pageant with 20 site performances, celebrating climate solution and sustainability initiatives being designed and implemented throughout the community gardens, neighborhood and East River Park waterfront. The artist/partner collaborations included 8 artists to engage community participants and develop performances exploring sites and their climate solutions with in depth engagement through 2-4 workshops to create dance, performance and visual art works exploring sites and climate issue and solutions. Partners University Settlement (PS63-youth) developed a dance performance on sea level rise, GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side) created a dance drama to affirm the community's vision for the East Side Coastal Resiliency plan and MOS Collective with artist Dee Maucher engaged Earth School students through 3 workshops to create a Wearable Mural and performance presentation celebrating their green roof. Artist Katherine Freygang led community participation on the painting of a 50-foot Mobile Mural celebrating the LES Sustainable Ecosystem and community vision for the ESCR (East Side Coastal Resiliency) waterfront redevelopment plan with 6 canvas panels developed through 4 workshops at 4 locations on the Lower East Side including Stuyvesant Cove, Loisaida and Two Bridges in partnership with NYC Parks-Asser Levy Recreation Center, Solar One, LUNGS Spring Awakening Festival, Sixth Street Community Center, East River Alliance, East River Park Coalition, Friends of Corlears Hook Park and the LES Ecology Center. 3 community groups developed performance works to present including LES Girls Club, 6th Street Community Center and Children's Workshop School. We generated 106 sessions, meetings, workshops and rehearsals with volunteers including the 51 public engagement workshop/sessions.
The creative community engagement workshops and partnership-building process culminated in a 6-hour procession of visual art, giant puppets, mobile sculptures and costumed garden-river-climate solution characters that visited 20 community gardens, neighborhood and waterfront sites. Each site enacted performances, dance, music, poetry and ceremonies created by artists, gardeners and community, celebrating the site's ecological sustainability and climate solutions including solar gazebos, permeable sidewalks, water filtration bio-swales, rain/pollinator gardens, water-harvesting ponds, composting/recycling, plastic-free zones/bio-degradable packaging and waterfront resiliency design including oyster planting to organically clean the river, bio-remediation projects to add beneficial nutrients to improve water quality, grey-water recycling, and a rolling hillside seawall berm and wetlands to buffer erosion and sea level rise. The myriad climate solutions revealed the ecosystem of sustainability throughout the neighborhood and the connection of these local initiatives to global climate challenges.
We ensured maximum participation from our target audience/participants through our network of residents, youth and community partner organizations we established over the past 29 years and with the committee of over 50 partner organizations for Ecological City. These diverse sector partners represented various constituencies and issues (gardens, community centers, schools (pre-K-through college), housing justice groups, coastal resiliency/waterfront coalitions, urban planning/redevelopment firms, and environmental and cultural organizations that intersected with ecological and sustainability plans in the neighborhood. We exceeded our goals of engagement due to the enthusiasm for the project and numerous groups that integrated our program into their programming.
Outreach also included public slide presentations, talks, panel discussions from a locally held garden harvest and spring street festival, to community board and city council hearings, and our featured presentation on Ecological City at various classes at New York University and community centers. We attended numerous community meetings to present the project to our Partners constituencies to engage groups to develop artistic projects for Ecological City. We participated in a wide variety of sustainability and climate related events, exhibitions and public actions to present the project's opportunities for participations and distribute postcards for the on-going workshops and culminating procession event.
We advertised the workshops and project through the distribution of color postcards, flyers, and color poster; newspaper listings; internet outreach on facebook, twitter, instagram, meetup, web-sites and e-mail blasts, as well as our website (earthcelebrations.com). Ecological City press featured articles and listings included the New York Times, Villager, Untapped Cities, Bowery Boogie, Town and Village, online blogs and interview for Earth Day on WBAI radio.
Videos of each site performance are being edited and have already been presented as "creative testimony" at a community board 3 and City Council hearings at city hall addressing the East Side Coastal Resiliency plan and will support these initiatives at city hearings and throughout the public review process. The Ecological City project's success can be measured by the enthusiasm and engagement from over 50 diverse sector partner groups and their integration of the project into their programming and curriculum. Many participants had previously been unaware of the extensive ecosystem of sustainability and climate resiliency solutions that existed and were in the process of designed developed and implemented throughout the neighborhood. The creative engagement process invited the diverse constituency we cultivated to learn about and explore these climate solutions within the physical sites of their own neighborhood. They also re-interpreted the information and data into creative expression with emotional impact that could be shared within the public forum of the Ecological City pageant to an even larger audience. The culminating 6-hour procession, like a mosaic, brought together the climate solutions through visual art and performance works presented at the various gardens, neighborhood and waterfront sites. The Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions was a community created cultural affirmation, revealing a powerful living model of sustainability and climate resiliency locally within the neighborhood and its important contribution city to global climate challenges.
Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions 2019 - Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDWrDQm50Z8