#SWEANews | #SWEA | #SouthWardEA | #SouthWardEnvironmentalAlliance | |
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Message from
Our Founder & Executive Director
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Welcome to February South Ward Family!
As we celebrate Black History Month, I appreciate this year's theme Black Resistance. This theme honors and recognizes the resistance of historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.
As I reflect on my work in the Environmental Justice space, I must thank the past, current and future EJ leaders for fighting for residents to Breathe Clean Air and have access to safe affordable drinking water in their neighborhoods and homes.
For the most part, community members, primarily people of color, started the environmental justice movement in the 1980s to address the inequity of environmental protection in their communities. The movement seeks to shed light on widespread environmental disparities and advocate for every American’s right to live in a clean and healthy environment.
As members of the South Ward Environmental Alliance, you are a key part of the South Ward EJ Movement to address the environmental racism and unfair treatment we suffer from today and historically based on our zip code. You are the current Voices we need to resist the continued oppression that targets our families.
As an Environmental justice advocate, we seek to address, repair, and provide solutions to the historical and ongoing environmental injustices that are disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color as well as low-income communities.
As part of our Environmental Resistance we must fight everyday to ensure environmental justice is prioritized in the government policies to address, mitigate, and alleviate environmental costs by dismantling systemic injustices and barriers to environmental and economic progress.
We will win, Mighty South Ward!
Stand up for Environmental Justice, Resist, Resist and Resist!
Your Life Matters. Join Us as we build One Ward, United for Environmental Justice.
In the Struggle,
Kim Gaddy, Executive Director
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Upcoming Events:
- SWEA Monthly Meetings
- Every 4th Wednesday
- @ 6pm-7pm
- Zoom Link
- Save the Date for SWEA's 2nd annual Enviornmental Summit
- April 22nd @ 10AM
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Clean Energy Jobs Coalition Meeting | |
On January 31st, South Ward Environmental Alliance’s Executive Director, Kim Gaddy and Environmental Justice Organizer, Asada Rashidi attended the Clean Energy Jobs Coalition meeting. The Clean Energy Jobs NJ coalition is working to ensure New Jersey’s clean energy transition is equitable and pro-worker. This coalition is composed of more than 40 community, labor, health, faith, equity, environment, and business groups including South Ward Environmental Alliance. The meeting consisted of ideas to strengthen strategizing advocacy efforts. Members discussed ways to influence elected officials to embrace an equitable transition to clean energy. Strategies to strengthen communication and community leadership through mobilizing non-traditional voices, using storytelling, Op-eds, advertisements, and targeted events were also explored. As a state and coalition, we can simultaneously take on the climate crisis and create well-paying, family-sustaining jobs. The coalition anticipates the state legislature to introduce a Clean Energy Jobs bill package in early 2023. Visit cleanenergyjobsnj.org to stay updated and learn how you can help. | | |
South Ward Environmental Alliance welcomes two new members to the team | |
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SWEA Senior Advisory Board Member Highlight:
Marva Hopps
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The South Ward Environmental Alliance has established a Senior Advisory Board
composed of senior citizens representing the Clinton Hill section, Weequahic section, and Dayton Street section, all areas of the South Ward of Newark. This board will seek to educate and engage other seniors from the community on environmental issues that are affecting the health and welfare of their specific population, and will motivate other senior residents to become active participants in the environmental justice movement.
We are proud to highlight this month one of our Senior Advisory Board members from the Seth Boyden Elderly community, Ms. Marva Hopps, affectionately known as “Cookie”, who was borned and reared in Dade City, Florida and migrated to Newark, NJ in 1999. She worked in child care for Karate for Youth in Irvington, NJ for several years.
Ms. Hopps said she was proud to have taken computer classes at the New Community Corporation. She later was employed as a dietician at the Mt. Carmel Guild until her retirement.
Ms. Hopps moved to Seth Boyden Elderly Complex in 2003. She later became active in the community working with other resident leaders. She is the founder and president of Women on the Rise and served as the tenant association vice president and later president. Ms. Hopps continues to serve her community in assisting other senior residents in need of medical and social services. Her life has been dedicated to volunteerism and advocacy.
She was asked the question of as a community leader and SWEA Senior Advisory
Board member, what do you see as your role to address the environmental issues in the community? She simply responded that her role is to educate other seniors on the environmental issues and its impact on their health and to develop other leaders in the community to continue this fight.
Ms. Hopps says the greatest problem that she sees in the Dayton Street community is impacting the environment is the immense truck traffic and the related fumes of
emissions that it generates. She also fears that as pedestrians, they have to carefully negotiate the truck and tractor trailer traffic often placing them at high risk of accidents.
SWEA welcomes Ms. Marva Hopps to the team and the energy that she will bring to our organization.
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Sonny William Gaddy Jr. Entrepreneurship Recipient:
Dena Corbin
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2023 Sonny William Gaddy Jr. Recipient of the Entrepreneurship Award
Growing season 2022 was a very full year for Natural Ground 1. On June 30, 2022, I had to close my schedule. I could no longer assist with planting any more gardens, lead any more workshops or take on any more speaking engagements. But that did not sit well with me. So, I decided to design a gardening program, with the name I used when I was a Special Needs Teacher entitled, “GrOW a Garden and GrOW Yourself: Where Gardening, Creativity, and Nature Meet”. This program focuses on teaching individuals, families, and communities my signature gardening skills. The program infuses my knowledge and most of all my passion for creating expansive garden spaces, the art of growing food and bringing people together for enjoyment. Having developed a unique way of learning engagement, skills development, and personal enhancement through the joy of gardening and connecting to Nature; I am beyond excited to get started.
I truly feel it is now time to impart that knowledge onto other people. I will be teaching my life’s work through field trips and invited speakers’ participants will learn about various aspects of gardening through a different lens. Engage in ways that will teach garden design and implementation of gardens and green spaces that offers a full wellness and well-being environment along with growing and harvesting food. Participants will be encouraged to support existing gardens or design one of their own and share what they have learned from Natural Ground 1: Grow a Garden and Grow Yourself, and the cycle of support continues.
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