Health - Community Green Space

New Haven Urban Resources Inc. (URI) is a small non-profit run by three part-time employees. Though a partnership with Yale University School of Forestry and with the help of many hundred volunteers around New Haven, URI is able to make a big impact on the community. Their mission is to promote community-based land stewardship, promote environmental education, and advance the practice of urban forestry, as well as provide Yale students with clinical learning opportunities. URI works in three areas: community forestry, environmental education and training and capacity building.

URI began in Baltimore Maryland in 1989 when the Baltimore Director of Parks and Recreation invited Yale Forestry professor William Burch and students to help educated teenagers around the area to develop neighborhood forestry groups. Social forestry was originally intended to help cultivate and restore rural areas of developing countries although the idea of working together as one to restore the beauty of nature within our community is what neighbors from all over are trying to achieve. The program was a great success and it was adopted in New Haven through Community Greenspace programs

The Community Greenspace program is about engaging citizens to do their part in taking care of their environment in a way that serves the citizens needs. Community Greenspaces purpose is to be responsive to community concerns such as invasive public lands and coming together to take part of anything they want to in their community that they wish to recover. During the first two years of its program, URIs Community Greenspace brought in over 45 neighborhood projects. Today they completed more than 221 diverse urban restoration projects, planted over 1000 trees and had over 500 annual participation of New Haven residents.

Nan Bartow, URI board member and a leader of friends of Beaver Pond Park said, One of the things we are trying to do is to remove all the invasive vegetation that doesnt belong in the native area (of Beavers Pond Park) and were replanting with native vegetation that belongs here in a setting such as this, we work with URI, United Way, The New Haven Parks Dept, Athletic Department, Southern Connecticut State University and King Robinsons Middle School.

Greenspace sites are based on the communitys initiative. Community residents are the ones who come together to make changes in their environment. They decide what they want to fix or recover and URIs Community Greenspace is there to help them every step of the way.

Community Greenspace impacts the community greatly because it involves neighbors, friends and family coming together for the greater good. It benefits the physical landscape such as improving soil, planting trees, clearing evasive materials and creating habitat for wildlife. According to executive director, Colleen Murphy-Dunning, Its a program that helps people to know each others neighbors, to grow as individuals, to grow as leaders of our community, to find ways to invest in themselves in making a difference in their neighborhoods, so its a way that bridges young and old, and bridges across races and bridges across economic class for the community to come together for the shared vision of how to recover their environment.

To learn more about New Haven Urban Resources Initiatives Community Greenspace program and how you can help, please visit www.uwgnh.org or www.yale.edu/uri/.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Community
• Green
• Space
• Urban
• resource
• initiative