By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
For years, commuters in the southeastern Queens neighborhood of Locust Manor were forced to walk through a wooded No Man’s Land called Railroad Park, which over time had become a dumping ground, on the way to their local train station. Resigned, they watched trash accumulating week by week in the tall grass.
But Alicia White saw what could be.
In 2014, White gathered a team of volunteers and set about cleaning up the neglected park, which she had grown up navigating on her way to school. The effort quickly gained traction — soon neighbors and elected officials were reaching out to ask how they could help.
What started as a grassroots campaign has now become something larger. In 2021, the park was renamed in honor of Gwen Ifill, the iconic journalist and longtime anchor of “PBS Newshour” who was born in the area. Today the city is carrying out a $21 million project that will bring a skate park, dog runs, pickleball courts, and a public bathroom to the once-ignored green space.
White has been busy in the meantime. Building on the success of her organizing around Railroad Park, White founded Project Petals, a nonprofit that transforms overlooked lots throughout New York City — and particularly in under-resourced BIPOC communities hit hard by climate change — into public gardens and urban farms.
Project Petals has played an instrumental part in the success of at least 15 sites, including the Bergen Street Community Garden in Crown Heights and the Paradise Community Garden in Jamaica.
While White’s professional background is in the nonprofit world, she notes that Project Petals’ environmental focus was directly inspired by her mother, who grew up on a farm in Alabama and brought her love of gardening to Queens.
More than a decade after its inception, Project Petals is poised to have a banner year. Earlier this month, the Pulitzer Center awarded White’s organization one of its 12 Civil Society Microgrants from a nationwide pool of applicants. The grant will fund a storytelling project and panel discussion in Queens about “how environmental inequities and extreme heat affect workers, public health, and the environment.”
“We’ve had one of the hottest summers, and it’s important that we get stories from our communities around this, so we can start planning and taking action,” said White. “It’s not going to get any cooler, unfortunately. Where do we go from here?”
This year also marks the launch of Project Petals’ youth fellowship, which will give five lucky recipients $500 each to create an environmental project in their neighborhood.
For more information, visit projectpetals.org.
