NY2NO

Today, Nat Turner, teacher at Our School at Blair Grocery took our BC/Wes/Pitzer group, representatives from National Youth Leadership Council and others on a field trip!

  So we went down to Tangipahoa, aparish with about 2,000 residents [about a quarter of whom came from New Orleans after Katrina], a parish with a 40% poverty rate and a median incomefor a family of three at 17,000. We went there and saw acres of land. That is what I would’ve said if I had driven past it. But today we saw and learned allthat the parish of Tangipahoa could be. What we saw out there on the great stretches of land that had thepotential to link the urban farm to the rural and vice versa. A place to expandthe work we’re doing and in doing so build with so many more people. Monday I probablywouldn’t have believe the words I’m typing , but currently , I know it’ll happen. Nat Turner and the Mayor of Tangipahoa, Michael D. Jackson (former NFL player) showed us the possibilities of using 40 acres of land to work towards food sovereignty in the rural town and in the Lower Ninth Ward. That would mean complete community control over good healthy food (production and distribution). The connection between Tangipahoa and the Lower Ninth would be not only built through a farm on that land but also would provide jobs for more then 300 young people as well as working towards rural and urban youth empowerment through service learning project together. Our School at Blair Grocery is making many partnerships with different organizations, restaurants and schools in Louisiana and after seeing Turner's vision. I believe that this is possible. OSBG is attacking inequality from all fronts: education, employment, food, housing and health this is a model that we hope to bring home to our own communities.

   Then we went down to TREE [Teaching Responsible Earth Education] and learned of new ways to learn about the earth and understand how important our involvement in it actually is. The change theearth undergoes has everything to do with us, and it is when we understand that, that we realize we have to take steps in creating a better world.This organization uses alternative education and experiential leanring to teach 5th and 7th graders about responsible energy consumption through awesome and engaging activities. I wish I had gone to a school like that! OSBG is partnering with them and plans to take young people from the L9W and Tangipahoa on field trips in order to learn and grow together.

   And partnerships are important inall of this. You can’t make changes alone and if you try, there’s a good chanceyou’ll burn out. This is a fear a few of us here have. We’re here now andcurrently being surrounded by other students interested in organizing hashelped us stay focused. But Saturday we leave, and then what? It’s so easy togo back home and forget about the problems addressed in our stay here. That’s the luxury so many people have and I think it’s one of the primary reasons change isn’tmade. Because the problems are so easy to ignore back home, even while thosevery same problems are a real possibility anywhere. The Lower Ninth Ward is notin the state it’s in now simply because of a really bad hurricane and really weak levee. It’s because the residents were ignored.

-Biola