On a deceivingly dry mid-February afternoon, the Planning, Advocacy, and Civic Engagement (PACE) team met with students and faculty from Dominican University of California to give an environmental justice themed tour of the Canal neighborhood.
Professor of Ethics Laura Stivers and Professor of Art & Design Lynn Sondag co-teach a course on environmental justice and community-engaged art as forms of environmental advocacy. In addition to lectures, the 20 honors students enrolled in the course fulfill a service-learning requirement by working with 4th and 5th graders at San Pedro Elementary School.
Because San Pedro Elementary School is made up of students from the Canal, a neighborhood tour was planned to help bridge the understanding gap between Dominican University students and their 4th and 5th graders’ home environment. It also supports their end-of-the-semester class project of creating art advocacy pieces for the community.
Starting at the newly renovated Albert J. Boro Center, the PACE team planned a walking tour to Tiscornia Marsh behind Pickleweed Park to demonstrate sea-level rise, then to Canal Street to highlight the only 15 single-family homes in the canal (excluding Spinnaker or Bay Point) and showcase dense housing, ending at Canal Alliance’s Neighborhood Office to discuss Food, Water, and Community Advocacy.
However, things did not go exactly as planned.
Fifteen minutes into the hour-long tour, it started pouring, making it difficult to walk into the neighborhood and navigate the unpaved, muddy paths at Tiscornia Marsh. Instead, we chose to take cover under Pickleweed Park’s newly built gazebo and did most of the “tour” there.
By the time we were wrapping up discussing overcrowding and housing injustices in the Canal, the rain let up a bit, and we decided to finish up the “tour” near the newly installed “Pickleweed Park” sign to help the students get a better look at the multi-family apartments in the neighborhood.
Lastly, we finished by highlighting the neighborhood’s assets, such as the mercados, or markets, filled with Latin American goods, and by spotlighting all the amazing community advocacy work that is ongoing in the Canal including the lighting project of Voices del Canal, the outreach Community Health Workers conduct, and our Nuestro Canal, Nuestro Futuro (NCNF) neighborhood planning initiative.
A huge thank you to Laura Stivers and Lynn Sondag for reaching out and to our Neighborhood Planner, Nayre Herrera, Assistant Planner, Nicole Aguilar, and Planning Fellow Daisy Alvarez for planning and executing the tour.
