 I could remember that the river was somewhere no one went to, that it was dirty, so that's how we grew up with it. This is the way to break those chains. This is the way to help them to dream. My name is Keana Kazemi, and today we're chatting with Brendan Shane, Climate Director of Trust for Public Land. Together, we'll learn about how the organization is tackling America's park equity problems through their community schoolyards projects. So Brendan, tell me, what exactly is park equity? One of the high level definitions we use is just who literally has access. So that's the 100 million people who can't walk to a park in 10 minutes. There's also then questions about the type of park in communities that identify as people of color. You've got parks with less space. You wanna connect everyone to the outdoors. So do you have any ideas where you're gonna find thousands of new spaces? I mean, when I think about my city, that sounds almost impossible. Yeah, it would be, except that we have a solution and that's schoolyards. The idea that you can take what are often asphalt, plain, really uninspiring spaces that aren't serving the community, and transform those into a community schoolyard that serves the students in the day and the whole community the rest of the time. There's a huge potential there. So Brendan, what does it take to go from this planning stage to actually building a thing? This here is a conceptual design for the Mastery High School of North Camden. Carmen Ubery, she's the community coordinator. She really started with her students. She brought the students together to see what elements they wanted to see in a park. And so you see the ideas that the students have brought forward and community members as well, all represented in the concept that then moves forward to final design. We caught up with Carmen Ubery, the community coordinator at Mastery High School. Carmen helps bridge the gap between trust for public land and the city of Camden to help community members unlock the full potential of the outdoors. When we realized that we had space in the back of the school that connected to the water, it's just a beautiful waterfront area that was untouched. We thought about how to make this space a place where we can develop some STEM learning. Let's get a group of students. They talked about all sorts of things, what they wanna see in a park, and they came up with phenomenal ideas, like solar lights and a way to drain the water when our city gets flooded. It was just very encouraging to see. I'm so excited about it and so ready to move forward with it. So Kiana, we're right in downtown D.C. at a park that's been revitalized and renovated in the last few years in cooperation with the community. And so you can see what it means in reality to go from the schematics and the ideas to work on the ground. Because sometimes it's years of planning, right? And then the whole community in design and then you go into construction and then the gates come down, the fences come down. So bam, you know, the kids are there, the families are there. Classrooms start using those spaces. This is the transformation that really should happen in every school. Everyone deserves it. You know, sitting over here and looking out at the beautiful green space, looking at the playground, I can't imagine the amount of cooperative action that had to come together from the community to make this happen. Yeah, there's so many small steps, so many different people and resources that are necessary, and then a long-standing relationship with REI that allows you to, you know, create the better outdoors that everyone needs. When I'm thinking about how I can continue to support movements like this, I love to use REI's cooperative action network to stay alerted on where to be and how to show up to support movements like this. You know, the beautiful thing about so many individuals taking climate action is that the sum of all of their work creates really meaningful change. This is what inspires me and the work we do at TPL is the potential to make that change, to create a vision so that future generations can, you know, build climate resilience and improve communities and provide a better outdoors. To be able to now provide access to our students and our families is even more powerful for us. It's where we want to go. And so we need to break down those barriers. We need to move all of that out the way and give the students, the children, the families, access to the water. What better way to do it than through community partnerships? That's how you do it.