Blacks in Green™ is celebrating 10 years of advancing our vision for self-sustaining black communities everywhere. Our mission is to mainstream "The City of Villages" - where every household can walk-to-work, walk-to-shop, walk-to-learn, walk-to-play, especially in African American neighborhoods. We will catalyze this increasingly urgent agenda with partners nationwide.
We are America's frontline, community-based CDC founded expressly to catalyze system change; reverse racial economic disparities; redefine black urban planning; mitigate climate impacts on communities of color; and measure outcomes in improved health/wealth of black residents. Thus, we teach the risks of global warming and opportunities of the new green economy, and work to build the local living economy as a greenhouse gas reduction strategy within African diaspora communities.
We're a national sustainability network and community wealth building initiative launched in 2007 to advance The 8 Principles of Green-Village-Building™ and The 12 Propositions of Grannynomics™ - our signature initiatives. We consult, teach, and lecture through emerging partnerships around the country, and serve as a bridge and catalyst among communities and their stakeholders in the design and development of green, self-sustaining, mixed-income, walkable-villages in black neighborhoods.
In our process, communities of color are financed to design, direct, represent, and benefit from economic development, with success measured by increase in household income and ownership of local businesses and land. Responding to our climate crisis, green-village-builders cultivate their sustainable-square-mile as a local living economy and greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Neighbor dollars circulate to finance local activities and investments, and the conservation lifestyle becomes standard.
Our strategy will: 1) increase the rate at which neighbor-owned businesses are created and sustained, 2) build the capacity of neighbors to own, develop, and manage the property in their community, and 3) foster the conservation lifestyle - the beautiful life! By cultivating our consciousness for stewardship in these ways, African Americans may restore our place in the world.
We have nurtured and taught our whole-system solution nationwide - from kindergartens to corporations - and will be presenting recommendations from our journey at the US Green Building Council conference in Boston this November in our new Sustainable Square Mile Handbook™ -- more news to come!
