Making Eastwick Whole

EPA Environmental Justice Student Video Competition

Community Partner: Carolyn Mosely, Eastwick United CDC

Team: Aminah McNulty, Allison Nkwocha, Celine Appolon, Nina Valentine, Ben Kalina Spring 2023

The Eastwick community in Southwest Philadelphia is home to organized, passionate, and resilient residents. They experience some of the most extreme and compounding environmental risks of any neighborhood in the city. Much of Eastwick is built on former wetlands within the low-lying confluence of Darby Creek and the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. The neighborhood experiences repeat destructive flooding during major storm events. It is also home to two EPA superfund sites, the Clearview and Folcroft Landfills. In 1950, the City began the nation’s largest Urban Renewal plan in Eastwick, using eminent domain to clear many properties to build 45,000 new homes. Only one tenth of that goal was met, resulting in the displacement of many long-term residents.

Working closely with Carolyn Mosely of Eastwick United CDC, we developed a proposal for building capcity among Eastwick residents to organize and advocate for change. The proposal builds on EU’s existing community ambassador training program by envisioning the adaptive re-use of the vacant George Pepper Middle School as a new hub for environmental justice education, experimentation, community gathering, and economic development. This place-based strategy is accompanied by a curriculum proposal that centers capacity building around environmental justice as a lived experience and intergenerational practice among youth, families, and elders. We worked with documentary film professor Ben Kalina and his student Nina Valentine to film and produce a short video for the competition that features neighborhood narratives and community leaders in support of the vision.