Go Green Walk

As New York City gets greener, more people are getting involved. 1199 SEIU Child Care Corp. and the Fordham Road Business Improvement District (BID) are pairing up for a day of awareness.

On May 17 at 10 a.m. about 500 children and their families will walk along Fordham Road and end in Poe Park, where there will be a fair with performances from the children, a dj in the bandstand, presentations on the kids’ science fair projects and popcorn, along with free blood screenings and other health services.

Of the children at 1199 SEIU, who range in age from 8 months to 4 years old, the 4 year olds have been leaning about keeping the environment and themselves healthy by doing experiments. For one of the experiments, the kids put Vaseline on index cards and left it on the windowsill, checking it with a magnifying glass. By the tenth day, the Vaseline was dark.

“They got to see how dirty the air is on Fordham Road,” said Bonnie Mallonga, chief operating officer of 1199 SEIU.

In another experiment, the children put a t-shirt, a piece of plastic and a banana each in some dirt to see how they would decompose. This environmental focus of the child care facility has always been a concern, and because NYC is slowly going green and the most recent science fair was a success, Mallonga decided to take the project to the streets.

The Go Green walk involves much preparation beforehand. The BID has handed out surveys to its 350 or so members, while 1199 SEIU has distributed them to the 250 families it serves. The surveys ask how concerned business owners are about environmentally-friendly practices, and what “Go Green” represents to them. In addition to these surveys, the results of which will be presented at Poe Park after the walk, the children are going to the businesses and conducting interviews with business owners. Two children from each class are preparing with practice interviews so they aren’t too shy around the new faces.

The surveys and interviews are aimed to “gauge awareness” of the businesses, said Dan Bernstein, director of the BID.

“If a child is there, it might be a little easier for them to want to participate,” he said.

There are questions as to how much the children understand about what they are learning. In order to gauge this, Mallonga and the teachers use charts and have one-on-one meetings with the kids to see how much they are absorbing. The real results occur at home, though, where the parents report that their kids talk about their projects, pushing their families to have recycling bins at home.

“They really don’t understand why people don’t recycle,” said Bernstein of the kids.

In March, the classes made recycling bins and painted them green. However, Toni-Ann Campbell, a teacher at 1199 SEIU, said they had to get rid of them because they were falling apart and getting smelly. The children “keep asking if we can continue,” she said, so 1199 SEIU is talking with the Department of Sanitation to get proper recycling bins so the kids can continue recycling.

There have been some harder lessons. One of the projects was to trace where the waste from the Child Care Corps go. The kids went outside and saw the private garbage company dumping the garbage and recycled materials together. Mallonga says they will be conducting a letter writing campaign to see if they can change this.

There is a precedent for seeing change come from their efforts. After learning about recycling, some of the children wrote letters to the cafeteria about their findings, and now the kitchen has stopped using Styrofoam and replaced it with paper. The next idea is to switch to using real spoons instead of plastic ones.

Although much work needs to be done before the children are ready for the Go Green Walk, they are doing what Mallonga calls transformative learning, where the kids are changing behavior based on the what they are learning.

“These are the children of the future,” Mallonga said. “They need to take care of the environment because they will be the ones profiting from it.”