The status quo suburban lawn – manicured, green, tidy – must be contested as we attempt to mitigate climate change and consider the impact of the way we live.  Neighbor2Neighbor is an environmental education and civic engagement project that intends to instigate community conversations and collaborations with this in mind.

​

Using a Participatory Action Research methodology, we will:

 

-observe, ideate, adjust, evaluate, and iterate

-surface and document existing funds of knowledge with regard to sustainability

-map community assets 

-engage community members in hands on and dialogic processes

-identify issues to tackle

-model permaculture practices, perennial food guilds, habitat, conservation, and soil health

-develop metrics for measuring impact 

-create toolkits for scaled use

-contextualize and connect this project to larger research and literature conversations

​

(DRAFT) TIMELINE 

 

July 2021

Fellowship training 

Preparation

Begin literature review, ground project in existing body of research

 

August 2021

PROJECT SETUP

Continued background research, identifying and reaching out to potential stakeholders and partners. Set up web-based project tools (website, Gdrive, etc.)

 

September 2021

INVITATION /INTRODUCTION

Public forum (F2F and/or Zoom) to explain project, engage community members, and invite participation

 

FUTURE ACTIVITIES

MAPPING

Documenting individual and community properties, mapping the political ecology and geography of neighborhoods, urban systems and nested hierarchies 

 

WORKSHOPS

Permaculture, plant, and other EE workshops to demonstrate successful lawn conversion strategies, answer questions, surface and note barriers to change

 

REGULAR CONVENINGS

(F2F and/or Zoom) community dialogue/speaker sessions, grow collaboration momentum

 

EMERGENT PROJECTS

Possible activities include blogging, podcasting, broadcast projects, eco-demonstrations, presence and representation at community events, food, fermentation and crafting workshops, art exhibits, theater, auditing local ordinances, comparative analyses of different neighborhoods, alternatives to policing, new commons mapping, organizing apps and civic analytics tools, curricula,and journal publication. 

 

Short-term Outcomes: An engaged community, increasing awareness of the need for change; documentation and understanding of barriers to conversion of green spaces.

Long-term Outcomes: Conversion of individual and communal properties and civic structure informed by sustainability practices.  

 

Our Partner Organization, Communicas, provides project consultancy and facilitates dissemination of project activities and learnings to regional partners, global ecovillage and sustainable communities audiences.  

 

This project offers a key set of innovations to address critical and often overlooked needs in action-research work, linking education and engagement with asset and power mapping in order to surface synergies between the direct land use opportunities of residents with each other, the natural and urbanized agroecology landscapes they inhabit, and the institutional and political geographies of the communities they live in.