Now anyone anywhere in the U.S. who has a big idea (or even a faint glimmer of an idea) for environmental change in his or her neighborhood can now use ioby to raise money, connect with local volunteers and share ideas to a community of people who might not live near you but who care about all the things you do.

Get started today by posting your project on ioby.org/idea. Or, if you’re not quite ready to lead a project just yet, then search around the map, find a project that’s close to your home or close to your heart, and drop a dollar or ten to their success. They’ll appreciate it and you’ll be joining the ranks of thousands of ioby micro-donors who give a little to make a big change.

*We are not actually in your backyard, to be clear.

Wait, what?

The above is not a fantasy, but rather what you might experience if you were kayaking along the Los Angeles River, a 51-mile long waterway that snakes through the city and into Queensway Bay. The river has famously been portrayed as an oversized concrete ditch in movies Grease and Chinatown, and for good reason: its riverbed was almost completely channelized in concrete by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the “Corps”) after a series of floods in the early 20th century. Today, the river is part wild, part man made. Converting the river was largely successful in curbing damage, but it also restricted how Angelenos get to interact with water.

Photo by Rick Loomis / LA Times

“There’s a schizophrenic mindset concerning how people think about water in Los Angeles,” joked river activist George Wolfe, 48. ”Some groups in town are trying to bring people to the water, while other groups are seemingly set on keeping people away from the water.”

Wolfe would know. In response to a 2008 EPA ruling that the LA River was not “traditionally navigable” and therefore not a river, Wolfe and a group of advocates kayaked the entire length of the waterway to prove that it was (against the wishes of the Corps and the County).

In 2010, the EPA revised a previous ruling and the river was deemed ‘navigable,’ and, therefore, a waterway protected by federal law. However, it is still not 100% publicly accessible. Safety concerns persist, and until advocates can prove that less-skilled boaters would be able to ride the river responsibly, it will remain a permit-only waterway with limited seasonal use.

Luckily, steps are being taken to transform the river from movie set to public recreation space. Last year, LA River Expeditions—led by Wolfe in partnership with the Corps, the City, and many other groups—created a pilot program to offer boat trips to the public. The 300 tickets sold out in ten minutes—at 7am on a Tuesday.

Safety was a major component. “It was one of the safest programs in the country: one staff boater for every two or three participants, rangers with defibrillators, helmets,” Wolfe described.

This summer, LA River Expeditions hopes to open the ioby project to 40 Los Angeles children, providing a safe and educational experience for boaters of all ages and experience levels. Schools and youth organizations from around the area have been clamoring for the opportunity to take part in recreational boating opportunities.

Photo by George Wolfe / LA River Expeditions

LA River Expeditions–though expert in navigating concrete channels– has teamed up with American Rivers (AR), a national waterway advocacy group, to navigate the legal channels. “This is an opportunity to expand access and enjoyment of rivers,” said Steve Rothert, 47, American Rivers’ California Regional Director.

About 15 million people live in the LA area, but only a small fraction of those people have had a chance to enjoy the river, much less kayak it. “In some places, you have to scale a ten-foot chain-link fence with barbed wire on top to get to the river,” explained Rothert. “At other points you can access it freely. That’s where we want to focus our efforts.”

Accessibility is a critical piece of the LA River’s allure. Unlike most other waterways throughout the Los Angeles Basin, the LA River is accessible by public transportation and borders 31 different neighborhoods throughout the city. Expanding access to the river would allow millions the opportunity to interact with nature without leaving city limits.

Photo by George Wolfe / LA River Expeditions

The river sits at the center of an ongoing plan to revitalize the city’s public space. “The city and county of Los Angeles have both been planning for the past ten to 15 years to revitalize the whole river corridor,” Rothert said. “We think the more people that see the river, the more support there will be to open it up for wider use.” The plan has been a long time coming, but could take decades to be realized.

“I just don’t have that kind of patience,” Wolfe explained, which is why LA River expeditions and AR are raising money for Adventures for Kids on the LA River. Besides giving kids the opportunity to kayak, it will serve as a lesson and a testament to the ability of a group of people to enact change in their communities.

To support this great work and learn more about how you can get involved, check out their project page.

Thanks to a group of high school students in Beantown, this future is not so far-fetched. Chain Reaction, an initiative of Bikes Not Bombs and one of ioby’s first projects outside of New York City, is grounded in the notion that the future of social justice in Boston lies in a comprehensive, citywide bicycle infrastructure.

Since 1984, Bikes Not Bombs has been training and employing local high school students to refurbish old bicycles and send them to high-need communities, both at home in Boston and abroad. The Jamaica Plain, or more commonly referred to as “J.P.,” neighborhood of Boston has long been the focal point of Bikes Not Bombs’ operations and public programs. With a bike shop that offers repairs and services, and educational programs for youth and other members of the community, the organization has become a fixture in the neighborhood.

Bikes Not Bombs’ Youth Development Specialist and Grant Writer, Sarah Braunstein, chatted with ioby last week to discuss how Chain Reaction got its start. “We’re driven by youth,” said Braunstein. “They’re the ones who were motivated to say, ‘How can we take what we do in J.P. and take it out to more people?’”

Braunstein knew that scaling up community outreach programs in J.P. to include neighborhoods citywide would take resources beyond the relatively small reach of a single organization. She recalls wondering how to open up retail bike shops in high-need neighborhoods—low-income areas of Boston that lack adequate bicycle infrastructure—with the limited resources available to them as a nonprofit. In particular, Braunstein remembered asking the group, “How do we get space for free?”

Neil Leifer, who Braunstein lauds as an “almost full-time volunteer,” helped secure a partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston earlier this year. Thanks in part to his proactive outreach to Clubs across the city, Chain Reaction has been able to open up shop in neighborhoods far beyond the borders of Jamaica Plain. Since starting up the initiative in March, six clubs across the city have taken an interest in bringing Bikes Not Bombs’ youth employees into their communities.

For a few days each week, Braunstein and a team of youth employees—all in high school, all ages 16 and 17, and all alumni of other Bikes Not Bombs programs—come to a Boys and Girls Club and offer their bike repair services to members of the community. “They do all the work, all the mechanics, and all the exchanging of money,” said Braunstein. “I’m really just there to supervise or help out if they need me.” As they work, the team also teaches repair skills to local kids and residents.

Braunstein and her group have found that they have stumbled upon a demand for youth-driven bicycle infrastructure that is far beyond their wildest expectations. “We’re at our second club now,” Braunstein told ioby. In these neighborhoods, there are “basically no bike shops, so we’re totally bombarded with work. The first club we worked at already wants us to come back.”

She continued, “There are youth in these neighborhoods who haven’t been reached because there hasn’t been a program that has worked with their type of knowledge acquisition.” Braunstein added that the youth she has encountered at these clubs “are focused, excited, and reliable. We are offering an opportunity to work with their hands.”

Chain Reaction was born out of a simple hypothesis. Braunstein and her team of teenaged bicycle entrepreneurs believed that a common assumption—that people in lower-income neighborhoods don’t bike or don’t want to bike—is simply not true. Indeed, said Braunstein, Chain Reaction’s mission is predicated on a theory that the problem “is just that there’s a lack of access.”

“On its own,” continued Braunstein, “the bike is an affordable mode of transportation and it makes a lot of sense for these neighborhoods.” For families and individual who struggle to make ends meet, the bike is an inexpensive and low-maintenance transit alternative to driving, and even public transportation. The success of the initiative in the month or so since its launch indicates that Braunstein’s reasoning may in fact be justified.

“The communities’ responses have been amazing. Every possible reason for someone coming to us has happened,” she told us proudly. “This is the beginning of something bigger.”

Just one month into its life, Chain Reaction is already living up to its name. The project is pushing bicycle activism to the limit, showing us all that there is profound power in pairing wheels with pure, unadulterated passion.

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You can give to Chain Reaction on ioby by clicking here: https://www.ioby.org/project/chain-reaction.

Since 2006, the Mill Creek Farm, founded by Johanna Rosen and Jade Walker, has been providing its local community with fresh, organic produce galore. Located between the major commercial corridors of Market Street and Lancaster Avenue, this formerly vacant lot has since been transformed into a burgeoning farm, teeming with fresh okra, beans, and bees.

The Mill Creek Farm’s existence stemmed from the idea that everyone should have access to local, organic, culturally-relevant food. In an interview with ioby, Johanna Rosen states, “Taking this trashy overgrown lot and turning into something that’s productive for the neighborhood and providing food access where there are limited options is very critical.” The farm is in the midst of a food desert where the option to buy fresh, local, pesticide-free produce is extremely limited, or nonexistent. Walker and Rosen, already experienced in agriculture and education, wanted to extend their knowledge to the surrounding community.
In a short documentary, below, about the Mill Creek Farm, Jade Walker talks about how the farm sprouted to life. She says, “We deserve the option to eat locally and to feed ourselves with food that we culturally want to be eating and that makes sense to us as far as recipes, as far as our family history, and that we also deserve to have the option to have food without pesticides.” And that’s exactly why the two farmstands of Mill Creek Farm offer affordable, below-market prices, and serve as the only ones in the area that accept Farmer’s Market Nutrition coupons and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) benefits.

Rosen can testify to the excitement of local residents to some of the food made available by the Mill Creek Farm. “Our first year we grew one row of okra and learned very quickly that that was not enough. Now we grow three rows of okra and usually still sell out of it within the first hour of market because it’s in such high demand. I think that just speaks to the fact that people can’t get the fresh produce they want other places…and it’s also really important that we’re providing a quality that people come back for; that it’s picked the same day, that it’s grown without any chemicals.”

While the Mill Creek Farm has faced some challenges in securing the land for permanent use, it serves as a staple to the community for those who volunteer and benefit from the cheap, accessible produce. In The Mill Creek Farm documentary Walker explains, “I don’t think that people come out to our volunteer days and community work days or even just stop by in the neighborhood because everyone wants to grow up and be a farmer…people want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. It’s an intrinsic human need to be working with other people, and be outside, and be touching the earth, and I think that’s what’s so cool about the farm here.” With that kind of passion driving the volunteers and friends of The Mill Creek Farm, it does not seem that they will be going anywhere anytime soon, at least not without a fight from the people in the community who have benefited from the Mill Creek Farm team and its dedicated and thankful residents.

With its seventh growing season in the works, the Mill Creek Farm is now looking to bring on two new staff members to help out with the prosperous farm, and help bring new ideas to the table. Its project on ioby has successfully raised $1800 and seeks to raise $8535 more. The money raised will also help to run its youth education program, and buy market supplies. With your help they can continue to provide healthy organic vegetables, fruits (and honey!) to local residents of West Philadelphia.

This video was produced by Good Eye Video. The good folks at Good Eye Video are also teaching a workshop series on shooting and producing your own how-to videos just like this. The next one is on Monday, April 16, at 6:30pm at the ioby office and will focus on editing your video content. Register for the workshop here.

For more information on our Recipes for Change toolkit, visit the Recipe archive.

For more than two decades, 143 Stockholm, an NYPD-owned vacant lot, was a neighborhood dumping ground and an ideal growing site for Ailanthus altissima, foul-smelling trees infamous for thriving in urban wastelands. Laying in between boarded up buildings, the 5,000 square feet lot is located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a largely Latino community where access to fresh food is limited. Recently, local artists have taken a keen interest in the space and are negotiating a four-year lease with the NYPD to turn the decaying lot into a flourishing community garden and green arts space.

Kaitlin Crowley, 24, after serving an apprenticeship with a CSA farm in New Jersey, was looking for a vacant lot to turn into an a community garden in Bushwick. It did not take long for her to realize that contacting the owners of vacant lots would be a challenge. “Many [vacant lots] were privately owned so there was a lot of confusion,” explains Crowley. Luckily, a legal advocate friend of hers referred her to 596 Acres, a public education project aimed at providing information and legal assistance about accessing Brooklyn’s publicly-owned vacant properties. 596 Acres’ interactive online map of city-owned vacant lots and lots that have been reclaimed by the community, brought her to 143 Stockholm.

Around the same time, Kim Holleman, 38, the artist behind Trailer Park: A Mobile Public Park—a portable public park housed inside an 18′x8′x7′ mobile repurposed travel trailer—was looking for a site to permanently park her socially and ecologically-minded creation. Since 2006 the portable park has been traveling throughout the streets of New York City, providing curious passersby with a green space to enjoy in their neighborhood. Holleman was interested in parking her living sculpture in a community garden located in Bushwick, where she has been a resident for 13-years and has an art studio. A quick zip code search via 596acres.org resulted in her joining forces with Crowley to revitalize 143 Stockholm.

The site has been named Xquizit Greens, a name derived from a car repair shop in Bed-Stuy called Xquizit Motors, which Crowley happened to pass by. “Xquizit Greens says to us that this is a spot where something beautiful and unexpected happens,” Crowley explains. With the neighborhood suffering from one of the highest levels of poverty and diabetes in the city and limited fresh and healthy food options, Crowley hopes that Xquizit Greens can provide a local food source and encourage healthy eating in Bushwick. She plans to promote purchasing seeds with food stamps through the SNAP program and have individual parcels along with communal beds.

In addition to the community garden, a green arts space will also take place at Xquizit Greens, with Kim Holleman’s trailer leading the way. Both Holleman and Crowley are anticipating to host workshops that include topics such as composting, seed saving, canning, jam-making and hot-sauce making at Kim’s trailer.

The Xquizit Greens team started cleaning up the lot on January 29 and have been meeting every Sunday since. Curious neighbors, including Ben Bois, an urban agriculturist, and Kate Mitchell, a native plants gardener, eagerly got involved in the project. Crowley says she feels lucky to be “working with talented, driven and passionate people.” A number of contractors and construction workers have volunteered to build stuff for the lot. “It feels great to make something happen with them,” she adds.

Crowley, who is also a Buying Manager for the Bushwick Co-op, is currently working on building partnerships with local businesses in order to use bike trailers to collect raw food scraps and compost them along with kitchen and yard waste from local residents. With a newly built 3-bin compost system, Xquizit Greens expects to begin the community compost program this May. “Composting is a priority for now… something we can all contribute together,” says Crowley.

Once enough soil is laid, Crowley would like to plant an edible fruit tree in the back of the lot—specifically, a Hardy Kiwi Tree from Mongolia. If all goes as planned, we will witness the demise of Ailanthus altissima, and the rise of edible trees in the 143 Stockholm lot–something truly “xquizit,” indeed.

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Xquizit Greens will be tabling with the Bushwick Food Coop at the Ridgewood & Bushwick Flea Market at the Onderdonk House (1820 Flushing Ave. Ridgewood, Queens), on Saturday, April 28^th (rain date: 4/29). Stop by their table to learn how to get involved in their current composting project or click here to sign up and help Xquizit Greens meet their fundraising goal.

I’m originally from the Chicago area and I came to New York City, oh, a lot of years ago. I came to New York City to go to school and now I live in Astoria, Queens. So I’ve been here for about fourteen years now.

Astoria is my favorite neighborhood. I do a culinary food tour as a little fun side project in Astoria. The tour that I do is a wider Mediterranean; we do Bosnian, Italian, Greek, and Egyptian, which I think is really cool because they’re some of the lesser-known ethnicities in Astoria. You have to love Queens for its ethnic diversity and food culture.

I have my masters in education, and I worked on art education predominantly in my studies. When I graduated, I was working in a couple of art education non-profits.

I worked with high school students, and I watched the foods that they were bringing in as snacks, and what they were calling their lunches, and it scared me.

Growing up, I loved junk food. But when I started spending my own money on food and realizing that I wasn’t getting full off of that, I started making healthier food choices on my own. When I saw that kids were not doing the same, it scared me. That was my ‘Aha!’ moment.

I love kids because they’re really not afraid to tell you what’s on their minds. They are really honest with you, and if they don’t like something or they think something is boring, they’re going to tell you or they literally go to sleep on the table in front of you.

They’re much more likely to try good food when they know where it comes from, when they’ve had a hand in making it. Something green isn’t as scary when you pull it apart and understand its components.

Beet gnocchi is really cool because it’s a hot pink fuchsia color. Kids love it because I talk to them about beets. If you can’t get your kid to eat beets, you tell them that they will pee pink and potentially miss school if they eat enough beets. Every kid will be chowing down on the beets.

My favorite is anything that has a gross-out factor tagging along with it. I like working with yeast a lot, and doing breads, because they love the science of the yeast. They say they can hear it burping and see all of the gasses coming out. You sort of wish you had that child’s vision, watching bread rise, and being able to hear it burp.

I was leading a green market tour for some fourth graders a couple years back. There was one student who told me he had never had an apple before, a fresh apple. That was a scary moment. It made me realize that things still need to be done.

I’m obsessed with food, and there are so many foods that are all about New York. I support my farm in a winter share and a summer share, so I’m eating local about 90% of the time.

Eating locally, there’s so many different ethnicities that you can play around with, and cook and eat.

Mustard is an awesome, cross-cultural thing. In my community garden, we’ve got people from so many different countries who have different food memories associated with it. We have a Bangladeshi family who talks about having a mustard farm back in their home country. My grandmother was Latvian and she talks about making mustard, which is just vodka and mustard seeds, and maybe some horseradish for spice. However, once you add vodka and mustard seeds together, I don’t know if you need any extra spice. But it definitely clears your sinuses.

Something that drives me everyday is hearing children’s attitudes change. In the beginning of the year, they see something green on the table and they pretend to convulse because they don’t want to eat the green thing. This week, we’re making a green soup with peas and asparagus and they think it’s awesome and they’re coming back for seconds and thirds. That definitely motivates me to keep going, when they’re no longer putting up a fight to eat something green.

The connections that you can make working locally and when you get involved with a community are really amazing. You start to hear people’s stories and you really start to understand people. It makes the city seem smaller and more comfortable.

I have this cantaloupe that was originally in some heirloom seeds that I bought. That cantaloupe crossed with another cantaloupe. It’s turned into the most amazing cantaloupe ever. Every year, I collect seeds from one of the cantaloupes. I take those seeds and packet them, and give some of these cantaloupe seeds to people in the garden. It’s really exciting to have something that you’ve created, pass it along to another gardener or another member of the community, and that they are then going to take the plant and sustain themselves with it. It’s an amazing cycle, saving the seeds and passing the seeds on.

Allergic to Salad is my newer blog that chronicles my life working with elementary school kids, teaching them cooking. It came about because earlier in the year we were making something that involved spinach and green things, and I set out a platter of things that we were working on in class. So there was a lot of green stuff that we were working with, and I had a student who convulsed on the floor and said that she was allergic. I said, “You haven’t even eaten anything and you haven’t even touched anything.” And she stood up and said, “I’m allergic to salad, so I can’t eat anything today.” So I said to her, “I’m really disappointed, because next week we’re making a chocolate salad. Looks like you’ll have to sit that one out also.” She said, “Oh, no, I’m not allergic to salad anymore. Just this kind of salad.” So that’s where the name comes from, Allergic to Salad. It’s a combination of ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things’ and my life working with elementary school students.

There was another instance where we were working with butternut squash and I talked about how butternut squash is like the brother to the pumpkin. As we started cutting up the squash, one of my students started crying because he said that we were killing the brother. But later he said that eating the brother was pretty good. I have some twisted kids, I guess, and that makes it more fun to cook.

I hope one of my biggest contributions was helping to save my community garden, which was on the brink of being turned into—well, I don’t know what it was on the brink of being turned into. That was a scary moment. So, in my own community, that’s something that I’ve held onto and have made a connection with.

There are so many amazing community gardeners and local activists around the city that are really inspiring. I think that all of those little projects are really inspiring when you hear about them and when they come to light. Every day, I’m re-inspired by people around the city when I hear some of the projects that people are working on. It’s not necessarily anything in the food world. Anything that really connects people to their community and to each other is amazing. That’s inspiring to me.

BGI is located at 153 Columbia Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11231. Directions: F/G to Bergen or Carroll; B61 to Columbia Street. BGI is open Monday through Friday, 10:00AM-5:00PM or by appointment: 718.522.0193 or art@brooklyngreenway.org.

About a hundred years ago, Marcel Duchamp took a urinal and he put it on a pedestal in a museum and called it art. The idea was, if you take something out of the flow of life and put it in a museum, which is out of the flow of life, it becomes art.

An artist who we are working with, Tania Brugara, said it is time to symbolically restore Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to the bathroom. To make it useful again. We actually did that. We have Marcel Duchamp’s urinal in our bathroom. It’s a urinal again. It has been repatriated. So she is having a meeting that we are sponsoring about useful art. There are environmental aspects of it.
Mel Chin has done a series of environmental works. He is a legendary guy. His most famous is one called Revival Fields, where he worked with a scientist from the US Department of Agriculture with certain kinds of plants which are hyper accumulators of cadmium and lead and planted them in some toxic waste sites in order to suck the toxics out of the soil and then burn the plants and mine them for cadmium and lead to pay for the process. So it’s a sustainable model of bioremediation.

He’s working on a huge project right now in New Orleans which is called the Fundred Project, that project is based around the idea of getting kids particularly, but also other people, to draw each person one $100 dollar bill. The idea of it is to raise enough money to deal with lead poisoning in New Orleans. This is a sort of post Katrina project. Already over 320 thousand people have participated in the project making individual works of art. And he’s going to go to Washington and try to redeem the money for bioremediation of the toxic wastes and lead poisoning in New Orleans. We were a Fundred site. We collected a lot of fundreds. He came by with an armored car.

Rick Lowe is this absolute visionary down in Houston Texas who has reclaimed a whole neighborhood. He now has a campus in a low-income African American community. He is an African American guy, grew up very poor on a farm in Mississippi. He has reclaimed a whole neighborhood as an art project.

It includes everything. He is building housing. He has revitalized several blocks of old row houses. They have community gardening. They are collaborating with Rice Architecture School on designing and building housing. He is a visionary of useful art.

We’ve been working off-site in Corona, at a particular part of Corona which is a low income mostly Latin American community in Queens, on a series of projects with artists (and some without artists). The major components have been public space and health and immigration. Part of the idea is that it’s all linked in together. You can’t separate the health outcomes from the community network outcomes from the environmental outcomes. So we’ve been doing big community festivals, often times based around big art projects.

Artists can draw a crowd. And when the crowd is there you test people for diabetes and high blood pressure, etc. When John Leonardo did a project as a Lucho Libre thousands of people were there and you say, “Okay, they’re here. Let’s see who has insurance.” Thousands of people signed up for low-cost insurance, which is like the public option if there were one — Metro Health Plus. Thousands of people got screened for various problems and they got immigration information.

This whole idea of cooperative art — that’s what I’m interested in, the idea that in the history of art the idea that the artist was this lonely person sitting in his studio is a very new idea. It’s only in the last thousand years that people have been isolated in their studios, before that, art was part of the collective.

We did a “social network map” of Corona and we had it mapped by this Center for Creative Community Development at Williams (C3D). The idea of social network mapping is to say that it is demonstrable that there are better social outcomes in communities with denser social networks, especially multi-layer social networks. So that if you are on the PTA and you’re also a member of the church and you’re also the member of a business association, and your neighbors are on those things too, and you have multilayered relationships and, for example, you show up at the Community Board meeting, and your friend who you talked to at the PTA doesn’t show up, you might call them and they might be lying on the floor waiting for someone to call and they answer and say “take me to the hospital!” The idea is to get more mutual surveillance.

So what we’ve done is one test of the social network map to understand both how dense the maps are and to understand how central the Queens Museum is to those maps, because the more central we are, the more important our role is.

We’re hoping is that we can demonstrate that the second time we do it, the map is denser, and The Queens Museum is more central. That’s the hope. If we’re actually helping our community, we’ve helped our community have denser social networks, we’ve brought people from the edges of the community more into the flow of interaction.
A good neighbor is someone who is active in the community. There are other communities I’m a part of besides my residential community, the art community, the school community. There are all these ways that actually having a kid ties you to a community — PTA, sports, etc.

I think privacy is overrated. It’s not associated with happiness. It is this protective sheen that Americans try to put around themselves which is unhealthy socially, physically, personally.

Every one of the happiness books says that being a member of a community, being active in your community is associated with happiness. All of these things that are counter intuitive to Americans are based on this idea of the individual, which is unhealthy.

There are very few animals that are as cooperative as human beings. We are aggressive and territorial, but we are also insanely cooperative. There are only four animals that have social units over a hundred thousand, and we’re one of them. So it’s ants, and bees, and I don’t know, bats, and us! And that’s amazing! So we have these social units, cities, and 8 million people are living together, and for the most part we cooperate. Then there is this question: why are we so fixated on the fact that we don’t cooperate?

I’m really rooting for our species to make it through all these problems we have, and the only way I can do it is by being cooperative. Not by being more competitive.

I had one experience with an artist, Merl Euchilles, not long ago and she did this project about this Jewish principle “tikkun olam” and it has to do with repairing the shattered world. She did a performance of it at the Center for Jewish History and the idea was for people to make some sort of pledge on the basis of that principle, it could be anything from being nicer to people, there is a whole wide range of what it could mean, she had this sort of performance and ritual. It was kind of hokey and I didn’t think it was one of her best pieces, but it actually changed my life.

There was this mirror, a two-sided mirror. You looked in the mirror and saw yourself, so it had to do with self-examination. So I made this pledge to repair stuff. These shoes have been resoled three times and I started to not just throw things out automatically. I did a renovation of my loft based on things I found on the street. I stopped using a dryer, cause you don’t have to, just hang things up and they will dry (Americans waste an amazing amount of energy on dryers). I just became much more conscious. I stopped buying stuff. It’s been a year and a half now and I’ve continued all this stuff. It was an amazing performance and it sort of crystallized what I was already thinking in a way, and it gave me motivation to make this commitment.

There is a lot of underlying spiritualism in artists’ work that doesn’t get acknowledged because it’s kind of embarrassing. The only artists who will say it are Buddhist, because they’re not afraid to say it.

Compost for Brooklyn is a volunteer-run organization committed to composting organic waste, restoring urban ecosystems, and sharing knowledge in our local communities and beyond. For more information on the other work days, and how to get your hands on a free tree, email compostforbrooklyn@gmail.com, or just meet them at 10 AM at the Compost for Brooklyn garden. See you there!