- La Colmena / Margarita Sanchez & Sarah Donovan's work
Our decades-long work with La Colmena applies an environmental justice lens to immigration, educational disparity, and healthcare inequality. Students and faculty have collaborated with La Colmena, a community organization dedicated to the financial, educational, and cultural well-being of Mexican and Central American immigrants in Staten Island’s North Shore. Wagner students have worked with these community members to narrate the impacts of local environmental injustices. La Colmena stands for “Improving the quality of life of Staten Island immigrant workers and their families by providing access to resources, education, job safety, leadership development and celebration of their cultures so they can advocate for themselves and their families.” (https://www.lacolmenanyc.org/who-we-are) Some of the programs in which students and faculty have been participating in the last ten years are:
- The Mentorship Program: Wagner College students have worked with elementary school children in the Port Richmond community. Students help the children of immigrants with their homework, work with them on any subject that needs reinforcement, and act as mentors.
- Mentorship Program with immigrant children from Port Richmond
- Storytelling project: Last Fall, with the financial support of a Mellon-funded Periclean Faculty Leadership grant, students in Learning Community #7 created digital stories focused on voting rights and the experiences of dreamers (some of them employees of La Colmena) who are fighting for the rights of fellow immigrant workers. Students learned about the stories of Central American immigrants whose families were forced to leave their territories because of poverty and the decline in smallholder agriculture.
- Digital Storytelling with Dreamers. Humanities Periclean Faculty Leader Fall 2023
- The reunification of migrant families: Wagner College participated for four consecutive years in the ground-breaking transnational project “Ñani Migrante” (Brother Migrant in Mixtec) that brings migrant families together after years of separation. This project was inspirational for both faculty members and students by providing for them a timely opportunity to learn about forced migration and grassroots responses to restrictive government immigration policies.
- La Colmena has hired more than three Wagner College graduates who are now working as organizers for the well-being of migrants and asylum seekers from around the world.
- Learning Community 17 (2023)—PFL
In the fall of 2023, faculty members from English and Anthropology piloted a new, first-year environmental justice LC that included a U.S. environmental literature survey, a political ecology course, and a co-led first-year seminar that taught the principles of academic writing and research through climate storytelling. In addition, students worked in Wagner’s Food Recovery Network chapter packing up surplus food for a local community partner, worked in the Wagner College community compost, and engaged in local maritime history at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Next fall, this LC will be offered again, supported through a Mellon-funded Periclean Faculty Leadership grant, which allows us to expand the LC’s engagement with two additional community partners: Snug Harbor, dedicated to maintaining the North Shore’s vital flood-reducing wetlands, and Freshkills Park Alliance, focused on preserving and creating a different narrative about the park, once the planet’s largest toxic landfill.
Wagner College Campus Composting was first started in 2015 as part of the Port Richmond Partnership Leadership Academy. Local high school students worked over the summer to build composting bins and learn about composting as part of pre-college coursework. In 2016, Wagner students involved with the Food Recovery Network began working with the campus kitchen to have their food scraps composted along with leaves from the campus. In 2019, three students completed NYC’s Master Composting Program through Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens. With the help of internal grants, these students were given a stipend to maintain the compost center and facilitate participation in experiential learning in various academic courses. From 2019 to 2023 several other students completed the Master Composting Program, and each year a student leader was supported by college funds to maintain the center and worked with students and faculty to facilitate experiential learning. IN 2020, with the support of a Mellon Foundation-funded Periclean Faculty Leadership grant and in collaboration with Snug Harbor, the compost infrastructure was expanded, allowing the Wagner College compost center to become a community compost location open to all Staten Island residents. Although the Mayor of NYC temporarily closed down all city-funded compost initiatives in December 2023, college funding has sustained a student compost coordinator position, allowing the center to continue to serve as a local resource and location of student activity and experiential learning.
Environmental History
Professor Brett Palfreyman teaches courses about the Environmental History of New York City and other cities around the world facing environmental challenges like rising water, access to healthy food, extreme weather, and more. Students in these classes have conducted hands-on research experiments testing whether oysters could be restored in Lemon Creek on the southwestern coast of Staten Island. See a video from the Museum of the City of New York explaining this project here. Professor Palfreyman also designed and wrote an interactive role-playing game where students adopt the perspectives of various different interest groups and debate whether or not to implement Congestion Pricing, a tolling system that seeks to reduce traffic and emissions in the densest parts of Manhattan.
LC7 documentation
In the two courses of this learning community, students learn about the struggles of immigrants and refugees and the justifications and explanations for one country’s military and economic control of another, focusing on U.S. military interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Mexico. The literature course focuses on the struggles of immigrants and refugees and is more generally interested in how different cultures and ways of thinking enrich our worldview. Students in this learning community completed two experiential components: The mentorship program and a digital story with Dreamers from Mexico.
- Research Sarah and Margarita
After establishing sustained relationships with organizations through years of co-teaching in an interdisciplinary learning community and working with members of the Port Richmond migrant communities, a faculty member from modern languages and a philosophy professor authored a humanities-inspired book about transnational families with a focus on the female experience, forced migration, and alternatives to keep families together. As a humanities book, the starting point is epistemic injustice, and the emphasis is on the importance of the woman, some of them migrants but all members of vulnerable populations, telling their own stories. The main focus is on how human relationships sustain individuals who face the hardships of migration.
- Environmental Migrants
This class will focus on how different global communities flee their homes because of climate change. It will consider the socio-economic conditions that affect people’s choice to migrate and how displacement risks disproportionately affect people from historically marginalized communities. Students in this class will be able to interview and interact with migrants from Central America whose territory of origin has been affected by long-term drought.
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- revitalize campus greenhouse
- class on food literature/writing
- food ethics
- community partnership with Indigenous food knowledge/community gardens for migrant families/asylum seekers
The mission of the Port Richmond Community Garden is to practice and educate the Port Richmond community on sustainable urban gardening. This garden will be a pilot project for the Port Richmond community to bring together various organizations and community members in building community, creating a sustainable garden, and providing education on urban gardening. This will be an excellent opportunity for migrant families to connect as many parents who left their homes can share their agricultural knowledge with their children. We want to follow the “Bronx Hot Sauce” model (https://smallaxepeppers.com/) and New Roots Community Farm coordinated by the International Rescue Committee in the Bronx and Queens. - look at what Lori did
- Campus Food Pantry with AmeriCorps VISTA
- Staten Island Economic Development Corporation - Forum for a Sustainable Future - High School Outreach