Grid Magazine April 2022 [#155]

THE

SERIES

CLEAR CUT APRIL 2022 / ISSUE 155 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

Why did the City allow a forest to be destroyed for a golf course?

Follow the green. page 10

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EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

A Heartbreaking Disgrace

director of operations Nic Esposito managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com art director Michael Wohlberg writers Marilyn Anthony Bernard Brown Nic Esposito Sonia Galiber Sophia D. Merow Alex Mulcahy Hannah Smith-Brubaker Lois Volta photographers Chris Baker Evens Troy Bynum Drew Dennis illustrators Britt Spencer Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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We can’t be surprised when people with wealth and power wield it, but we can be disappointed when our politicians fail us so completely.

This is a grotesque chapter in the Kenney administration.

Parks & Rec, run by Ott Lovell, did nothing to protect the trees. She bowed to the foundation’s wish to denude the forest, and her department then had the audacity to issue PR statements claiming that the forest was nothing more than invasive species. This has been refuted by everyone we’ve spoken with who spent time there, including a former member of the Kenney administration.

No documentation backing up Parks & Rec’s claim has been presented.

Over the course of three years, the Cobbs Creek Foundation claims to have met over 100 community members, a meager number, but they offer no specifics about their outreach. Grid journalist Bernard Brown attended one of the meetings, but nothing was mentioned about clearcutting the forest.

This month we are launching our 2030 Series: The Past, Present and Future of Sustainability. Every month we’re going to be taking

an in-depth look at one particular facet of sustainability: energy, land use, the circular economy, food, etc. While we will be focusing on one topic a month, our ultimate goal is to help shape the conversation for the next mayoral race.

Philadelphia deserves an administration that puts its residents first and takes their environment, environmental justice and access to public space seriously. We’ve got no time to lose.

ALEX MULCAHY Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com COV E R IL LUSTRATIO N BY B RITT SPENC ER

I L LU S T R AT E D P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

publisher Alex Mulcahy

he heartache was still fresh when Fred H. Cartwright emailed us.

“Our little slice of heaven is going away, tree by tree.”

If you wanted to teach a class about environmental racism, and learn about the importance of trees simultaneously, the deforestation of 100-plus acres of city-owned land for a golf course in Cobbs Creek would give you ample curricular material.

Trees cool and clean the air, something you want in a city suffering from the heat island effect and poor air quality. Trees are critical to stormwater management, something you want in a city that has neighborhoods plagued with flooding. Trees reduce stress and can actually lower your blood pressure, something you want in a city that seems designed to destroy your mental health.

The 100 acres of forested land in Cobbs Creek was an asset to the community—a beautiful, biodiverse green space for all to experience.

Now it’s gone, and nothing can bring it back.

Even if Parks & Recreation commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell resigns, which she should immediately. Even if Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr.’s campaign is fully investigated for suspiciously-timed donations, one of which was obviously illegal.

Even if the 501(c)(3) status for the Cobbs Creek Foundation is rescinded for this illegal contribution. Nothing will bring back the beauty of the felled 100-year-old trees and the refuge they provided for both people and wildlife.

The architect of this project is a West Conshohocken-based nonprofit, which has three members of the billionaire Maguire family on the board. It receives money from the Maguire Foundation, which—you guessed it—is also run by the same Maguire family. Conveniently, both organizations are headquartered in the same office.

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ECONOMY AND MAKERS ISSUE

When Grid first launched in 2008, Mayor Nutter was elected on a forward-thinking platform that established Philly’s Office of Sustainability as well as the city’s sustainability masterplan, Greenworks. Over 14 years, the term sustainability has entered the mainstream and has grown to include other movements like racial, environmental and economic justice. As scientists warn us that we have less than a decade to make meaningful progress in addressing climate change, Grid is embarking on a year-long journey to reflect on the past, present and future of the sustainability movement. Each issue will be devoted to a specific topic, exploring what we need to accomplish by 2030 to ensure the best, and avoid the worst, possible outcomes.

JANUARY 2023 WASTE ISSUE FEBRUARY 2023 COMMUNITY AND EDUCATION ISSUE MARCH 2023 POLITICS AND ACTIVISM ISSUE APRIL 2023 FUTURIST ISSUE

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by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

Are the men in your life actually feminists?

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here are times that I struggle being a feminist in the work that I do.

It doesn’t always feel like I am making a difference and men don’t actually want to learn how to clean, cook and give women domestic equality.

Many times I feel like a misandrist toward men who aren’t fourth-wave feminists, a movement that began around 2012.

Born of women using social media to speak out against abusers of power and seek justice for assaults and harassment in a more supported way, the fourth wave has honed in on not just women’s liberation but everyday empowerment and intersectionality.

Oppressing and objectifying women has, in large part, been part of our global culture and how we have historically taught and 4

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raised men. The movement presses men to be willing to look at how—unknowingly— they contributed to the need for an additional wave of feminism in the here and now.

The fourth wave of feminism brings the value of our persistence to our everyday voices. It’s about having the courage to speak up when we feel or see injustice, as opposed to saying “men will be men, boys will be boys.”

It’s time to agree that this is outdated, regressive thinking.

My hope is that the work I do as a domestic educator validates women from where they stand, in their own homes. It’s normal to feel silenced and to suppress anger for the sake of family or relationships. No one wants to rock the boat if they are afraid they might fall in the water. If you don’t know

how to swim, you might drown. Big picture: learn how to swim.

One of my favorite parts of my job is teaching open-minded men how to clean. I help them understand the value of domestic work by honoring the work that came before— not only by appreciating their newlylearned skills, but giving thanks and reverence to the work done by the hands of the women throughout their lives.

When we ask if the men in our lives are actually feminists, what we mean is: do they support our questioning, our daily concerns and the change we want to see? Are they on board with the fourth wave and willing to look at how they have been part of the everyday oppression of women by being born and raised in a patriarchal society? I personally encourage men to ride the fourth wave of feminism. Otherwise, they will inevitably get hit by it.

This is a hard truth for many men because it requires deep change.

Within all of the waves of feminism there has been substantial pushback from men.

When I feel this pushback I remind myself, as a humanist and a Quaker, that dripping IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO IS VOLTA

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

water hollows out a stone, not through force but persistence.

Women have made men feel uncomfortable and threatened in each wave by pushing for respect, equity and equality.

As a woman, I like riding the wave we are in now. I like to empower people in their homes. I see a huge need to validate domestic and emotional experiences to achieve a broader version of human equality by focusing on the reversal of outdated gender norms.

I went walking with a friend who described how all she wants is for her partner to validate her emotional experience and the hurt she has felt in the relationship. She tries to understand her partner, shows kindness, listens and is working on herself so she can be more empathetic and compassionate. How many women do you know like this? Most likely, all of them.

But she gets enraged by feeling silenced and swept under the rug. Her rage, to me, is an appropriate response. Men need to understand that women get angry for not having a voice. This anger has been bred in women for centuries.

Gaslighting women’s anger is being an anti-feminist. Women’s anger changes the world. It is healthy, necessary and productive. It was the type of energy that spurred the first wave of feminism—to have a voice, to be valid, seen and legally recognized.

But most times women’s anger pushes up against the ingrained, socially-expected behaviors of women. A good place to start reshaping the narrative is in remembering that a person who wants relational equity (to be respected, understood, listened to and treated like an equal partner) is a normal, sane person.

My friend’s story is not unusual. So many women want to be heard, from where they are standing and where they rest their heads at night. They want to be seen and heard by the men in their lives that say that they love them. Liberation for women can happen at home. lois volta is a home life consultant, artist and founder of The Volta Way. Send questions to info@thevoltaway.com.

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A Roadmap for Justice Philadelphia’s first urban agriculture strategic plan will be available for public review in May by sonia galiber Soil Generation is a Black & Brown agroecology coalition of women and nonbinary farmers and

organizers working to ensure people of color regain community control of land and food, share resources and prioritize community healing, grow food, and protect and commune with the land.

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e at Soil Generation have been organizing for land justice for growers of color in Philadelphia since 2014. Community control of land is the foundation of our collective struggle toward liberation.

Whether the issue is food, education or housing, community control of resources requires community control of the land.

As rapid development displaces community gardens across the city, one of our greatest challenges has been reclaiming the narrative around urban agriculture. It is not just a hobby. Rather, it is the foundation of food; community and cultural sovereignty; and resilience and resistance by historically underinvested communities of color.

Interlinked with this, another challenge has been getting the institutional support

From left: Author Sonia Galiber, Mindy Watts of Interface Studio and Ashley Gripper of Soil Generation work at the Land-Based Jawns garden.

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needed to preserve, protect and invest in our gardens, which has been difficult because of this perception of urban agriculture as a hobby.

In an effort to ensure community voice in policy recommendations around food and land, in 2019 we began co-creating Philadelphia’s Urban Agriculture Plan: Growing from the Root, commissioned by Parks & Recreation and co-created with Interface Studio.

The process has engaged and integrated the wisdom of hundreds of dedicated growers and community advocates. We prioritize the experiences of disinvested communities who are on the frontlines of food insecurity by creating a more accessible engagement process, with services such as language translation and American Sign Language interpretation; paper mailings of our online

engagement to neighborhoods with elders; and ensuring participants are from neighborhoods especially impacted by poverty, development and displacement.

The plan aims to uplift the culturally significant history of urban agriculture and confront the legacy of structural racism as well as land-based oppression, and in doing so, establish a comprehensive framework for investing in agriculture and food justice, and clearly define the resources, policies, processes and programs necessary to sustain urban agriculture in Philadelphia.

A draft of the plan will be published for public review in May at soilgeneration.org.

We invite you to take a look and begin thinking about your role in implementing the plan’s recommendations.

Once the plan is finished, the hope is that it can be leveraged by the public to hold the city accountable for making these plans reality.

Implementation is most important. The plan itself does not put policy into motion, but it provides a comprehensive context, along with research and justification for these policies, and a community-informed roadmap for a more just local food system.

As Soil Generation, this work has been challenging because we hold our radical values with deep commitment, something that inevitably creates friction with institutional protocols. We have been challenging traditional power dynamics, naming invisibilized labor and trying to hold a process that will create something that is accessible and beneficial to the most marginalized of us—all while simultaneously combating the institutional pressures that continue to oppress our communities’ ways of life.

While finishing this plan is a major feat, our policy work continues.

Policy is not the litmus test for what is just. Policy reflects those who write it, enforce it and interpret it. Policy, while left to its process, fails to rectify the relationships that will ultimately carry us into a way of life that is as abundant as nature herself.

Realizing that policy is an apparatus that stands between us and our vision of culturally-rich, healthy agroecological communities, we fight for threatened gardens and for community control of land: the land we steward and all the history, labor and love it holds. We fight for racial and economic justice. We organize. ◆

P H OTO C O U R E T S Y O F C H R I S D I S TA S I

farming advocacy

Hannah SmithBrubaker is the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture.

Policy Makes It Possible Invest in the food on your plate by supporting progressive farm bills by hannah smith-brubaker

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n 2020, pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to include a farm bill in its state budget. The bill invested in, among other priorities, urban agriculture, farmland conservation, workforce development and new market opportunities, including an unanticipated investment in organic agriculture.

Given Pennsylvania vies regularly with Washington state for second in organic farming (California is #1), this was some much appreciated recognition.

We now have a federal farm bill, covering everything from nutrition to conservation to energy, on the horizon in 2023. We need consumers, eaters, activists and legislators to stand behind sustainable farmers to facilitate real change in what we subsidize so that our

tax dollars support the essentials for maximum impact on climate and communities.

Local food systems depend on these relationships. When farmers are connected to consumers in the region, it supports their ability to continue to invest in sustainable farming practices and their communities.

When consumers are connected to local farmers it allows them to taste and benefit from the value of healthy food. Advocacy can result in the necessary support and cushion needed to weather uncertain times.

Farmers markets and CSAs can cyclically fall victim to the convenience of grocery stores or home delivery services. As a farmer myself, I’ve seen how market winds can shift demand without notice.

For example: the recent extraordinary,

overnight demand for farm-sourced products during the pandemic. Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, the organization I lead, had the opportunity to work with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture early on in the pandemic to craft guidelines for markets, aiming to keep customers and farmers safe, while ensuring that the essential work of feeding people carried on. Today, the world is emerging from this crisis that has waylaid many of our plans and left us still vulnerable at the intersection of health, labor, finances and supply chains.

Pennsylvanians know that we hold a rich asset of fertile land, and our farmers want to protect this to ensure that consumers have access to the highest quality local foods. Over the past 5 years, Pasa has been working with almost 200 farmers across the Mid-Atlantic region to develop benchmarking data, to provide a roadmap to healing our soils—both for conserving our natural resources and for ensuring we can grow nutrient-dense food far into the future.

The organization has seen sustainable and conventional farmers at the table together, learning from each other for the purpose of improving their soil health practices.

With the arrival of the Biden administration, agricultural organizations have been asked to take on leadership roles in the climate mitigation strategy.

Pasa was thrilled to be a part of crafting language around and seeing the concept of farms be included in a modern version of what is shaping up to be a Civilian Climate Corps, based on the original Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) of FDR’s New Deal. Unfortunately, this much fought-for program is now a stalled budget reconciliation bill, also known as the Build Back Better Bill.

If it passes, this opportunity means young people out on farms, working with farmers as they put into practice the principles of stewardship that define sustainable agriculture. Who knows? Maybe some of these young people will not only be the next generation of conservationists but ecologically-minded farmers as well. If you do nothing else this spring, please take time to connect with your farmer and assure them you value them and the part they play in feeding your family and stewarding our natural resources.

And, if you feel compelled, call your legislators and find out what they are doing to advance climate-smart agriculture. ◆ AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 7

The Fairmount Water Works’ exhibition on segregation and public pools was damaged in the intense rains brought by Hurricane Ida. Flooding also washed debris and logs onto the museum’s outdoor space.

After The Storm Fairmount Water Works had adapted its facility to withstand flooding, but Ida’s inundation last fall was too severe to prevent damage by bernard brown

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he schuylkill river, swollen with runoff from Hurricane Ida, was rising fast.

Karen Young, the executive director of the Fairmount Water Works, knew it was only a matter of time until the river’s chocolate-brown water flooded the Interpretive Center, the water-focused museum next to the Fairmount Dam. “I was in the center the day the flood event occurred,” Young says. “It was a crazy weather day. It was raining and there were tornado watches. I’m probably like most 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 2 0 22

Philadelphians these days, and I’ve got all kinds of apps on my phone to alert me.”

Young knew she and the other staff had to clear out electronic equipment and at-risk exhibit materials before the floodwaters hit.

That would have been a heavy lift any day of the week, but on the evening of September 1 the center was kicking off POOL (Grid #153, February 2022), a major exhibition, with a VIP event.

“After five years of hard work pulling together an exhibit about segregation and public spaces, pools, we had people flying

in, bussing in. We expected over 200 people for the event that evening,” Young says.

Water Works staff did what they could to contact attendees before they arrived at the soon-to-be-flooded museum.

“We knew that we couldn’t reach everyone, so we were there,” Young says. Sixty people showed up. After some rushed toasts, they did their best to gobble up the catered food. Luckily the exhibit assembly team was still on site, and they quickly dismantled what they had just set up.

Along with exhibits about Philadelphia’s water history and a video feed from the Fairmount Dam Fishway, the Water Works also hosts a freshwater mussel hatchery, showcasing efforts to restore the native molluscs to our waterways.

“When the storm hit I was there moving equipment out,” said Lance Butler, senior scientist in the Office of Watersheds for the Philadelphia Water Department. “Luckily we saved 70% of the equipment and supplies.”

Luckily (or unluckily) this was not the facility’s first flood. When the museum opened in 2003 it expected a damaging flood every 100 years.

“If that was the case I’d be 500 years old,” Young says. “It’s happened five times.”

By 2021 the exhibits inside were designed either to withstand immersion in water or to be quickly removed. There was no drywall or carpet to be ruined by river water.

The Water Works became a museum

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water

relatively late in life.

It started off in 1815 as the pumping plant for the city’s drinking water, its iron machinery housed in a complex of neoclassical buildings looking over the Fairmount Dam. It filled a reservoir where the Philadelphia Museum of Art now sits (on the “Fair Mount”).

When it opened it was considered an engineering marvel, attracting visitors from around the world. It closed in 1909, but reopened in 1911 as the Philadelphia Aquarium, which operated until 1962, replaced by a swimming pool, which lasted for 10 years.

The structure itself was built to last. After each flood, the Water Works staff has cleaned up, and then reinstalled exhibits and electronic equipment. Still, Ida was something different.

The force of the water burst through doors, Young says.

“I don’t just mean wooden doors,” she explains. “The metal grates we use to keep debris out were sheared off. Of eight windows, seven were blown out. Six inches of muck was caked everywhere, and that we’d never seen anywhere in that amount.”

Water rising to the ceilings destroyed the

I spent three months after the storm at the Water Works in the mud, disinfecting everything I could ... ” — lance butler, senior scientist at the Philadelphia Water Department

sprinkler system as well as the elevator.

“A lot of non-movable objects got destroyed,” Butler says. “I spent three months after the storm at the Water Works in the mud, disinfecting everything I could, and storing everything in the biosolids recycling facility.”

Young recognizes that this won’t be the museum’s last major flood. As global warming makes storms more intense, Idastrength events will be more common.

“We’re going to change how we operate and look at more resilient materials to keep the people and the building safe and dry,”

Young says.

The Water Works is opening each section only after renovations to make it more flood-resilient are complete. The POOL exhibit relaunched in March, with the mussel hatchery and an additional exhibit space slated to open in April.

“We have no intention of abandoning the building,” Young says. “I think when people come back and see what we have been able to accomplish, we’ll have a new group of advocates and stewards. I’m encouraged that we can share what we’re learning about what works and doesn’t work.” ◆

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A centuryold forest gets wiped out for a golf course

• A tulip tree, native to Philadelphia, is one of many felled for the Cobbs Creek Golf Course.

Arborists estimate that these trees were approximately 100 years old and over 100 feet tall.

C A R C , W A ‘S story by bernard brown

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he sound of trees being cut down woke Fred H. Cartwright on the morning of February 23.

“Saw, crackle, then boom. Then a minute later, saw, crackle, boom. It had us all out of the house looking to see, ‘What is that noise?’” recalls Cartwright.

Cartwright lives on Wyndale Avenue, a well-kept one-block street of two-story brick row houses in the Overbrook Park North neighborhood of West Philadelphia.

The block of Wyndale runs northeast to 10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 2022

southwest and then makes a 90-degree turn at the edge of Cobbs Creek Park to become 77th Street.

Up until that morning, the end of the block looked out on about 30 acres of woods at the northern edge of the Cobbs Creek Golf Course. The columnar trunks of tulip trees, red oak and other hardwood trees climbed to a canopy more than 100 feet above. Judging by the rings on trees that have been cut down, these woods were there for about 100 years.

India DiValerio lives on the end of Wyndale by the woods, and the noise woke her up as well. “When I heard all the clunking … I didn’t know what was going on. Seven o’clock in the morning, boom, boom, boom.

You couldn’t sleep. It was nonstop all day.”

Seventeen years ago, Cartwright and his wife were looking for a larger house, but Wyndale caught their attention. “It’s eye-catching when you drive on the block,” he says. “We said, ‘Man, it is small,’ [but] we looked out and saw this beautiful woodland.

We said, ‘Man, it’s nice.’”

DiValerio has lived on the block for 25 years. “The reason I moved onto this block was because it was a quiet tree-lined street, a one way,” she says. “That land over there was one of the reasons.”

Neither Cartwright nor DiValerio knew about the tree cutting ahead of time.

Development for whom?

Project advocates have touted that the Cobbs Creek Golf Course, which opened in 1916, stood out in its early history as having been an integrated, women-friendly course during segregation, when most private clubs and the PGA were open to white men only.

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Today, the residents of the West Philadelphia neighborhoods around the Cobbs Creek and Karakung golf courses don’t resemble the golfing public.

The population of the 19151 zip code, which includes Wyndale, is 89% Black.

It has a median household income of just under $50,000 and a per capita income of $25,000, according to 2019 U.S. Census statistics. 20.3% percent of residents live below the poverty line, and 55% are female.

By contrast, 80% of golfers are white and 77% are men, according to a recent article in Ebony Magazine about efforts to diversify the sport. Benchcraft, a company that sells advertising on golf supplies, signs and benches, claims that the average golfer’s household income is more than $100,000.

Golf is also an expensive sport. The cheapest set of clubs at Dick’s Sporting Goods is about $300 (on sale), and a single round of 18 holes at the Cobbs Creek Golf Course will set a Philadelphian back $68 on a weekday and $78 on a weekend, according to an exhibit in the lease that the Cobbs Creek Foundation signed with the city. The nine-hole Karakung course will cost Philadelphians $30 on weekdays and $35 on weekends.

“I don’t golf. I don’t know anyone that golfs,” DiValerio says.

Cartwright says he once tried hitting balls on a driving range but hasn’t golfed since.

How it began Not surprisingly, the idea to overhaul the golf courses, and cut down more than 100 acres of trees in the process, did not arise from the demands of the golf courses’ neighbors, or, for that matter, from anyone in West Philadelphia.

It began in 2007 with a group of golf course design enthusiasts who met on an online forum called Golf Club Atlas. Led

by Mike Cirba, a technology officer from the Lehigh Valley, they dug into the history of Cobbs Creek and Karakung golf courses and realized that the Cobbs Creek course, in particular, had once been one of the gems of the golfing world. A Cold War redesign to accommodate anti-aircraft missile launchers, decades of deferred maintenance, as well as chronic flooding from the creek, had left both courses in rough shape.

They launched a blog, printed a spiral-bound book with historical photos of the course and formed a group called Friends of 12 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 2022

Cobbs Creek Golf Course. With some encouragement from the Fairmount Park Commission (a predecessor to Parks & Recreation), they began planning and fundraising.

In a pair of YouTube videos from 2013, Cirba and Joseph Bausch, a chemistry professor at Villanova University, talk about their vision for the course while referring to paper plans for the renovation. (The maps in their hands look virtually identical to those currently being shared by the foundation, nearly nine years later.) They speak about their desire to involve the community and to keep the golf course affordable. In one video Cirba says: “Some trees will be removed, some trees will be planted in other areas,” but that they intend the project to have a net environmental benefit.

A group of golf course design buffs weren’t able to carry out a multi-million-dollar golf course renovation on their

Since 2017, Curtis Jones’ campaign has received at least $22,000 from individuals or organizations connected with the Cobbs Creek Foundation. own. That took golf enthusiasts with a lot more money, and much better connections.

Chris Lange, a commercial real estate broker and competitive amateur golfer got involved in 2010, and by 2016 they had lined up support from the family of insurance magnate James Maguire Sr. In 2018 the Philadelphia City Council passed legislation authorizing Parks & Recreation (PPR) to enter into negotiations to lease the golf course, and the Cobbs Creek Restoration and Community Foundation (aka the Cobbs Creek Foundation, or CCF) was formed. On December 28, 2021, the foundation signed a 30-year lease, paying $1 to rent 350 acres of city property assessed at over $92 million.

A family affair Who are the people from the Cobbs Creek Foundation? A James Maguire is listed as a director, and the chairman is Chris Ma-

guire, who also serves as a director of the Maguire Foundation, a major funder of the Cobbs Creek Foundation. Megan Maguire Nicolleti, also listed as a director, is the President and CEO of the Maguire Foundation, and a fourth Maguire, Lucy, serves as the vice president of development.

Looking beyond the Maguires, Chris Lange is the founding CEO, and Chris Lange Jr. is vice president. A director named Amara Briggs is a banking executive from Bala Cynwyd. Charlie Pizzi, chair of the Independence Health Group (owner of Independence Blue Cross), and Carl Jones Jr., a Comcast executive, are also directors.

Philadelphians might recognize other directors such as Harold T. Epps, the city’s former director of commerce, and U.S. Circuit Court Judge Marjorie Rendell, ex-wife of former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

The people behind the foundation are wealthy and well connected.

In 2017 Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr., whose fourth district includes the courses and the surrounding Philadelphia neighborhoods, introduced the legislation to allow the city to negotiate the lease. Since then, his campaign has received at least $22,000 from individuals or organizations connected with the Cobbs Creek Foundation.

In an eight-day period in September 2021, several individuals connected with the foundation, as well as the foundation itself, made donations totaling $7,000.

The foundation’s donation of $2,500 is illegal due to its status as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which are barred from taking part in political campaigns.

After Grid revealed the donation on March 2, foundation communications representative Michael Rodriguez told Grid the donation was an “error” and they are working with Jones’ campaign to have it returned. These donations occurred while the foundation had zoning permit applications pending for clearing trees on the golf course and was still negotiating the lease.

At the end of December 2021 the lease was signed, and two permits for clearing trees on most of the site were approved.

Two other permits for clearing on steep slopes were denied, though the foundation appealed. As of March 13, the appeals have been withdrawn.

DiValerio had not been aware that Jones had received campaign contributions from

India DiValerio and Fred H. Cartwright are long-time residents of Overbrook Park North, which abuts Cobbs Creek Golf Course.

They were unaware that the forest near their homes would be clear cut.

the foundation as well as individuals connected with it until asked for her comment.

“The next time he goes to run, I’m going to make it my business to make sure he doesn’t win,” DiValerio says. “You work for the people who got you in office, not the people who put money in your pockets.”

An engaged community?

Grid asked the foundation for details about its community outreach process. Rodriguez’s emailed response neglected to provide information about what groups they met with, when or where: “Since 2019, CCF has held multiple meetings with civic leaders, religious leaders, residents, community organizations and others … In total, CCF met with more than 100 community members.”

More than 33,000 people live in zip code 19151.

Clearly, the community outreach process began well after Cirba and the other organizers had decided on the design for the course (which was no later than 2013), and a year after the city passed the legislation authorizing PPR to begin negotiating the lease in 2018.

Unsubstantiated claims When Grid questioned PPR and the foundation about why so much deforestation was necessary, they said that the existing trees were actually a problem.

“The rampant spread of invasive species and overgrowth along with creek deterioration and heavy flooding create an unstable environment for any natural landscape to thrive,” according to Maita Soukup, communications director for PPR. “We do not take the removal of trees or vegetation lightly,” Rodriguez wrote. “However, much of the vegetation throughout the property is of poor ecological value and impenetrable due to the overgrowth and the presence of invasive shrubs and vines.”

When asked for supporting documentation, Rodriguez replied with a general statement about their landscape planning process, but did not provide documentation to back up their assessment of the forest.

PPR’s Soukup referred Grid to the foundation for documentation.

On March 6, I accompanied arborist Jacelyn Blank as well as a colleague of hers who prefers to remain anonymous. The two

tree experts and I scrambled over downed trunks of tulip trees, beeches and white and red oaks. We waded through thickets of twigs that until recently had been more than 100 feet up in the canopy.

“Many of them are native species that are really mature,” Blank says. Some had obvious patches of rot that might have made them vulnerable to fall over in a storm, the sort of weakness that could prompt a landowner to cut down a tree. In the middle of the woods, however, the only thing a falling tree would hit would be other trees.

I asked the foundation about how tree removal was communicated to the public.

According to Rodriguez, “the public response throughout the engagement process has been overwhelmingly positive, with widespread support for revitalization efforts.”

Rodriguez specifically mentioned a January 2022 town hall meeting, “during which time the Foundation shared site preparation plans, including removal of invasive species and trees.” The phrasing is important here.

Who wouldn’t support removing invasive species and trees?

AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

Ripple effects While the community outreach, limited though it may be, has been focused on the neighborhoods directly surrounding the golf course, the impacts of the tree clearing will be felt downstream.

Cobbs Creek flows into Darby Creek at the western edge of the flood-prone Eastwick neighborhood, which has been the site of environmental justice organizing by residents.

“No one from the foundation reached out to the Eastwick Community to discuss the clearing of the trees,” Carolyn Moseley, President of Eastwick United, wrote by email. “I only learned of it by word of mouth and an article that was published. It is my hope that someone will reach out to us to discuss this matter as there is a potential for adverse impact on the Eastwick community.”

Although the City of Philadelphia owns the land, a sliver of the golf course to the south of Cobbs Creek is in Delaware County. Parkview Road runs for about half a mile along the golf course in Upper Darby, separated by the easily-crossed tracks of SEPTA’s Norristown High Speed Line.

“I didn’t hear anything via Upper Darby,” says Laura Wentz, vice president of Upper Darby Township Council, who lives on Parkview Road. “I saw them clearing the trees along Haverford Avenue and freaked out. I saw later they were cutting down trees farther into the park, and now they’re doing it behind my house.”

Temwa Wright, a resident of the Cobbs Creek neighborhood and a member of the Cobbs Creek Ambassadors, a group that conducts cleanups and restoration work in the park, was also taken by surprise.

“It’s crazy, so many trees cut down,” Wright says. After being involved with the city’s TreePhilly planning process as well as Rebuild, the city’s program to renovate park and recreation center infrastructure, Wright says she would have expected the city to reach out about extensive tree clearing nearby. “I don’t care about the foundation. I live in the city, and I want to hear from the city government.”

The Impact Center, an organization based in Haverford that connects youth from the Main Line with volunteer opportunities in Philadelphia, has merged with the foundation to conduct outreach and provide educational programming for the golf course, according to documents attached to the golf 14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 20 22

course lease agreement. The Impact Center representatives have not yet responded to a request from Grid for comment about their outreach activities. From their website, it is unclear whether they have ever led a community outreach process or administered educational or youth development programming in West Philadelphia.

The Cobbs Creek Foundation’s website and other outreach materials promote the proposed community impact of the golf course, including golf teams sponsored at local high schools, golf course maintenance training programs for local teenagers, and educational programs offered at schools and at a planned education center on the golf course. In a January 2022 Philadelphia Inquirer article, the foundation says it “will establish robust programming for the Cobbs Creek community” while raising awareness of the course’s past.

According to figures from the National Golf Foundation, in 2019 golfers played 441 million rounds on 16,300 courses, for an average of about 27,000 rounds of golf per course. At two other Philadelphia municipal golf courses, Walnut Lane and John F. Byrne, golfers played 26,078 and 24,234 rounds, respectively, in 2020 (Annual Report, page 15).

In Baltimore, which has five municipal golf courses, only one topped 40,000 rounds per year, according to figures from 2013 to 2015 (2016 Request for Solutions, page 7).

Although the pandemic spurred a bump in golfing activity (similar to other outdoor activities), golf has otherwise been losing popularity after a peak in the 1990s. About 30 million Americans golfed in 2006. In 2021 that number had dropped to about 24 million. The rate of course closures has recently slowed, but more courses have closed than have opened every year since 2009. The viability of the foundation’s community and educational programs depends on the new courses bucking long-term national trends.

Golfers only, please

You work for the people who got you in office, not the people who put money in your pockets.” india divalerio Overbrook Park North resident

An ambitious budget, a declining sport The educational and community programming planned by the foundation depends on revenue from the golf courses. According to the operating budget included as an exhibit to the lease with the city, the foundation expects the courses to make an annual $1.9 million profit on $9.1 million in total revenue, a margin of roughly 21%. That $1.9 million is what will pay for foundation overhead expenses as well as the educational and other community work.

Of course, the revenue depends on how many people play golf at the courses. The foundation estimates that golfers will play 43,647 rounds per year at the 18-hole Cobbs Creek course and 43,162 at the Karakung course.

There’s not much you can do on an active golf course besides golf. You can’t ride a mountain bike through the fairways. You can’t walk your dog. You can’t have a picnic on the greens. You can’t walk the trails as you can in other park spaces.

On a December 7, 2021, Zoom meeting about the golf course hosted by Councilmember Jones’ office, William Fraser, transportation project manager with the Clean Air Council, requested that the Cobbs Creek Foundation consider allowing part of a regional multi-use trail (the Forge to Refuge Trail) to run through the course. Enrique Hervada, the foundation’s senior vice president of development, said that flying golf balls would make it unsafe for non-golfers to traverse the course.

Fraser wrote: “It is disappointing that residents and stakeholders were not made aware of the golf course’s plans to remove a large area of trees, which residents enjoy for recreation. The [Clean Air] Council hopes the Cobbs Creek Foundation will pause their construction work to engage with the community and hear residents’ concerns and wishes for this green space, including the potential of a multi-use trail.”

A Philadelphia landscape ecologist familiar with the park system who spoke with Grid anonymously due to the political-

ly-charged nature of the renovation, questioned whether a renovated golf course is a better land use than a forest. “What does the city need right now, a first-class city golf course or tree canopy?” they said. “This city is getting hotter and losing tree cover. What are we going to do about it?”

A park denied It does not appear that the golfers behind the renovation project, the Cobbs Creek Foundation or city leaders ever asked the community what they would like to see on the 350 acres of parkland that, for at least 30 years, will be off limits to them, unless they pay $68 to play golf on it.

“The Cobbs Creek Foundation may point to numerous engagements with stakeholders and city officials but engaging and advising proximate residents and the environmental stewardship [and] advocate community requires significant effort and intention,” emailed Kiasha Huling, the director of University City Green (UC Green), an organization that promotes tree planting in West Philadelphia. “The Cobbs Creek Foundation is not uncommon in suffering from inadequate outreach, communications and inclusionary practices in development. West Philadelphians are unfortunately familiar with environmental development happening in their neighborhoods, seemingly without their inclusion or consideration.”

At the edge of the woods on Wyndale Avenue, an old Fairmount Park Commission sign reads “Wyndale Gardens and Trail Entrance.” Behind the sign is a patch of grass now used by neighbors as a picnic and gathering space. The gardens disappeared as the neighbors who maintained them grew older, and the trail has been blocked for several years.

“When we first moved up here, my husband and I and the kids used to walk that trail. You could get to and from other parts of the park,” DiValerio says. About five years ago, “they cut down a tree so you can’t go down there. I don’t know why they did that.”

I asked DiValerio what she would like to see in the public land at the end of her block. “I would have said I’d like to see it as a park. That’s one of the reasons I moved around here,” she says. “I’m not a person to pull up race, but I think if this had been a white neighborhood that would not have happened.” ◆

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RETROSPECTIVE

ISSUE

LEADING THE CHARGE Grid’s Alex Mulcahy speaks with all three directors of the Office of Sustainability

The History 2008 was an exciting time to launch a sustainability magazine. From out of nowhere (or so it seemed), a community of bold thinkers and innovators coalesced around issues like local food, stormwater management, renewable energy, green building and recycling.

Christine Knapp, who was working for the environmental advocacy group PennFuture, was central to two organizations setting the stage for the birth of Philadelphia’s sustainability scene: Next Great City, a PennFuture initiative funded by the William Penn Foundation in 2005, convened health, environmental and civic organizations to brainstorm.

They collected 80 suggestions, which were winnowed down to a 10-point environmental agenda designed to shape the conversation in the upcoming mayoral race.

Secondly, Knapp led the Urban Sustainability Forum, which brought leading voices, both local and national, to the stage of the Academy of Natural Sciences. As Knapp points out, “I think one thing to remember is the Urban Sustainability Forum was the first time we were using that word.”

The culmination of Knapp’s policy work and public promotion was hosting the 2007 mayoral candidates at the Academy, which would greatly benefit then-Councilmember Michael Nutter’s campaign.

Katherine Gajewski, who was working on Nutter’s outreach team, remembers the debate at the forum.

“The contrast between Bob Brady and Michael Nutter, in how they were speaking to these issues was so stark,” says Gajewski.

“At that moment, I felt things were starting 16 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 22

to click.”

Nutter had asked University of Pennsylvania urban planning professor Mark Alan Hughes to act as his chief policy adviser.

Hughes, then working toward a degree in architecture, agreed, though he admits: “I would have never said yes if I thought he would win.”

One of the dozen or so policy papers Hughes had written for Nutter was on the environment. Following the success of the Urban Sustainability Forum, there was so much momentum around the issue that Nutter decided to create the Office of Sustainability (OOS). Nutter asked Hughes to head the new office, so he (reluctantly) quit architecture school and got to work.

Mayor Nutter boasted that he wanted Philadelphia to be “the greenest city in America.” Hughes’ first task was to put together Greenworks, the overarching document which would create goals and outline the city’s sustainability efforts. Hughes admits that this topic was not his bailiwick, but he had plenty of good sources to draw from: the aforementioned 10-point plan from Next Great City; the work that had been done by the under-utilized staff in place under Mayor John Street; New York City’s PlaNYC and Chicago’s Climate Action Plan.

Hughes would serve in the position for a year—a very busy year, when he would log over 200 public appearances. He was eager to return to the halls of academia, so he approached the task of broadening the audience of sustainability with a self-described “mania.” But it wasn’t just his mania that led to the extensive speaking gigs. “There was so much demand to hear about this top-

ic that I just felt like I had to. I was supposed to be saying yes.”

After Hughes’ year of public appearances, Katherine Gajewski took the office, and served in the position from 2009 until 2016.

Gajewski was a decidedly more low-key personality, though she was no less effective or driven. She was not quite 30, but she had already proven her political skill as the coordinator of the Breathe Free Philadelphia Coalition, the organization that successfully advocated for the city’s smoking ban.

She went on what she calls a listening tour, reaching out to as many government departments as possible, with the goal of spreading sustainability leadership among all of departments.

She says, “I felt successful when [Deputy Mayor of Transportation and Utilities] Rina Cutler and Mike D[DiBerardinis] got in a big fight over who got to own one piece of Greenworks,” recalls Gajewski. “I was like, ‘Yes, this is wonderful.’”

Things came full circle when Jim Kenney was elected mayor in 2015, and Knapp became the third person to hold the position that was created, at least in part, by the work she had done as an activist years before. Her tenure has coincided with more frequent extreme weather and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“We can’t talk about future resilience unless we address the past harms that have put neighborhoods in situations where they’re more vulnerable to future risks,” Knapp says.

“There’s a reason Eastwick is so vulnerable to flooding, and it’s 1950s urban renewal.”

The Long View On February 1, I had the opportunity to interview (via Zoom) Hughes, Gajewski, who now lives in Chiacago, and Knapp. They know each other well, and their camaraderie is apparent. After some reminiscing, the conversation turned to the present and future. Fourteen years after the launching of this office, how were they feeling about the state of the world?

Hughes began: “I’ve never spoken to a 20 year-old, who says the source of their anxiety is when somebody tells them the truth.

The source of their anxiety is when a bunch of people in power don’t seem to be taking the problems fully seriously.”

He also believes that the framing of action around climate change has been flawed. “It’s not about meeting the 1.5 or the 2.0 degree

KNAPP: CHRIS BAKER EVENS

[Celsius] target. It’s continuous work. So everything you do, as an individual, or as an institution, can help. And therefore, you should continue to do as much as you can.”

Gajewski agrees that the deadline-driven approach, couched in terms of loss, is not as effective as it needs to be.

“It’s all been about managing loss, rather than really stepping into the abundance of what’s possible and helping to paint a picture of what we gain by making some of these fundamental changes that are required in order to address racial injustice, in order to address our economic structure and how that’s resulting in climate change.

None of this is going to get solved in our lifetime. This is multi-generational work.”

For Knapp, a trip to Copenhagen to attend the c40 conference, a network of mayors working on climate change around the world, was transformative. “Even though I always tried to use more positive messaging, I really didn’t fully buy it myself until I [went to Copenhagen]. They were in a similar post-industrial, down-on-their-luck kind of situation. To Katherine’s point, climate change can multiply risk, but it can multiply opportunity.”

And what are the opportunities? Gajewski believes that the gains will revolve around values. “I think about this in terms of a caretaking society. I was in a conversation this week around the Build Back Better [Plan] and [it was asked] are we going to decouple the child tax credit and climate.

If we’re gonna be the kind of society that is able to take ambitious action on climate, those are the same values that support children and families.”

Hughes agrees that a transformation in values is necessary, and cites economist Lord Stern (who will be honored by Hughes’ Kleinman Center for Energy Policy) for bringing up values in the bottom-line driven world of business. “He’s basically said, [forget] benefit-cost analysis. For an economist to stand up and say that is just earth shattering. We don’t need to calculate the benefits, we only need to calculate the costs, and anything we can afford to do is exactly what we should be doing.”

Gajewski believes that the next step—and it’s a very difficult one—is getting beyond the network of cities that have embraced (at least symbolically) sustainability. “We’re really only touching city governments in our country, where there are 30,000 munici-

CHRISTINE KNAPP, Director of the Office of Sustainability

MARK ALAN HUGHES

2008–09

2016–Present

KATHERINE GAJEWSKI 2009–16

AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 17

palities. So what we’ve done without maybe recognizing that we’ve done it is we’ve organized entirely around likeness. Getting to scale is going to mean extending out and allowing ourselves to confront differences.

[Working with] local governments that have different politics and communities that have different priorities.”

She adds: “I hope that Black Lives Matter and some of these other social movements help to show us the way forward. Government and policy are always lagging behind social change, which is why the movement side is so important. They’re the first movers, and they’re framing the future.”

Knapp concurs that for sustainability to really take hold, it has to involve not only city governments, but also small town municipalities and the state and federal government. “Cities alone are not going to solve this problem. Even if we do everything that we said we’re going to do in the Climate Action Playbook—and there’s a pretty big risk that we’re not—we still have a huge gap to getting to carbon neutrality by 2050 for the city. But if you take the Biden administration’s goal of having a completely car-

bon-free electricity grid by 2035, we eliminate the piece that we have left.”

Energy policy at the state level would also be impactful, especially if it wasn’t being driven by the same big cities. “If you had York and you had Erie and you had Scranton, a contingency and coalition of mayors across the state that’s bipartisan. If it’s not all urban, I think it would actually make a bigger impact,” Knapp says.

“But why would those smaller cities want that policy? They don’t have staff prepared to do power purchase agreements, to do [electric vehicle] transitions of their fleet, to do community solar projects in their community. So to Katherine’s point, would we be better served trying to get other cities to have sustainability staff or to to get their planning commission staff to practice some of this work in their communities so that they are more oriented toward advocating for policy change?”

Advice for the next director We closed the conversation with a question: What advice would you give to the next person to hold this position?

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Hughes: “I think recognizing that many of those solutions will be beyond your control, and recognizing the essential importance of partnerships. Sometimes they’re going to be higher levels of government. Sometimes they’re going to be banks. Sometimes they’re going to be utilities that operate regionally or larger. Those partnerships aren’t a burden.

They’re not an appendix. They are central to being able to accomplish the tasks that the constituents are depending on.”

Gajewski: “I think continuing on the trajectory toward community-led and community-engaged planning. Those who are closest to the problems are closest to the solutions.”

Knapp: “We need other departments to take a lot more ownership over this than they have in this administration. We’ve got our coalition of the willing—Parks [& Recreation] is always going to be friends, [the Water Department] is always gonna be friends—but the tougher ones. I think they’re not fully there. And in order to have the capacity and to do more, bigger things at scale, I think we need the Biden all-of-government approach, at the municipal level. ◆

AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

RETROSPECTIVE

ISSUE

PASSING THE TORCH One councilmember’s mentorship of another pushes us toward a sustainable Philadelphia story by nic esposito

“When you have children, it’s important that they listen to you, but it’s equally important that you listen to them.”

T

hese words of wisdom from former-Councilmember Blondell Reynolds Brown are what inspired her to listen a bit more closely one afternoon in 2008, when her middle school-aged daughter came home and told her what she learned about in school that day: environmental justice.

The term piqued Reynolds Brown’s interest and when she did more research, she realized just how much it aligned with the goals of the newly-elected mayor, Michael Nutter, who had won on a platform of making Philadelphia the greenest city in America. She may not have envisioned it then, but environmental justice would come to define much of her legacy on City Council.

“This was an opportunity for me to take the seed my daughter planted and put some policy legs on [it],” Reynolds Brown explains.

Reynolds Brown, who joined City Council in 2000, was primed to make her impact on Mayor Nutter’s sustainability agenda.

In 2012, the newly-elected council president Darrell L. Clarke made her the chair of the Committee on the Environment, which was created in 2004.

From this position, Reynolds Brown had great influence over Mayor Nutter’s burgeoning Greenworks plan, which was to serve as the blueprint to achieve his 20 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 20 22

lofty sustainability goals. Reynolds Brown credits Greenworks with giving her fellow legislators the language, fluency and policy ideas that they could act upon to make the plan a reality.

“I remember while doing a lot of our hearings that most people in the audience did not look like me—the activists, the policy wonks … ,” she recounts. “I was not represented on that side of the table. And the sad news is that those who’ve been impacted from a fairness, equity standpoint always look like me. And so that to me was it. It required me to become fluent in the world of the environment and sustainability and look for opportunities where we could grow the activists.”

Long before the excitement of Mayor Nutter’s sustainability agenda, Reynolds Brown was a second year at-large councilmember taking the time to keep close to her constituents.

As an at-large member, her work one morning took her to the Philadelphia High School for Girls, right across the street from the Olney Transportation Center. Reynolds Brown spoke to an audience of hundreds of girls, but one 15-year-old in particular was inspired by the powerful alumna at the podium—Katherine Gilmore Richardson, who became a councilmember herself in 2020.

“I loved her story,” Gilmore Richardson, now 38, remembers of that day sitting in the audience in front of Reynolds Brown.

“She talked about being the oldest of seven [children] and having to have gumption.”

Gilmore Richardson worked up her own gumption that night.

She wrote a letter on her typewriter and went to drop it off at Reynolds Brown’s house the following day. Luckily enough, Reynolds Brown was working in her front yard garden and accepted the letter personally. This began a correspondence that lasted through Gilmore Richardson’s college years.

It was during this time that Reynolds Brown’s sustainability work as a councilmember took off.

One of the major initiatives Reynolds Brown recalls working on with her fellow councilmembers, including Jim Kenney and Mark Squilla, was a plastic bag ban that was defeated three times while Reynolds Brown was on council.

She views those defeats differently now that the ban has been passed.

“It takes adults seven times to hear something before we get it right. To bring other people along to understand the value of something,” she says.

She recalls that the first introduction of a plastic bag ban was met with opposition from plastic industry lobbyists, who were knocking at councilmembers’ doors saying that it was a very bad idea.

But her fellow allies on council were willing to do the work pushing the ban’s benefits.

“At the end of the day, as a legislator, you have to have allies and you have to be willing to do the work of authentically engaging and informing colleagues so that we could get to the magic number nine votes,” she says.

While the ban didn’t pass during her time on council, she wasn’t discouraged.

“It just means you can’t get it [passed] now, so you have to try it again later in a different environment.”

That new environment came in 2020 when Councilmember Squilla’s most recently introduced plastic bag ban passed 15-2. Reflecting on what it took to get to that win, Squilla affirmed the long game.

“The journey to pass [plastic bag] legislation in Philadelphia was long, bumpy and often circuitous,” Squilla recounts.

But Reynolds Brown’s tenure on City Council was not defined by defeat.

When asked for her proudest moment while chairing the Committee on the Environment, she points to the successful 2016 ballot initiative that established the Office P HOTO G RAP HY BY D RE W DENNI S

Katherine Gilmore Richardson (left) and Blondell Reynolds Brown stand behind the Gilmore Richardson’s desk at City Hall.

of Sustainability in the city’s charter as a permanent part of the government.

“If it’s not in writing, it doesn’t exist,” Reynolds Brown says.

This law change set up the Kenney administration to not just inherit the Greenworks plan, but inherit an office to carry it out.

Although Mayor Kenney made the Rebuild program (to fix up parks and recreation centers) and free pre-K through PHLpre-K (both funded by the soda tax) the major platforms of his campaign, he also took an exceptional move as a politician regarding sustainability.

Rather than scrap the Greenworks plan in lieu of his own initiative, he for the most part kept the program as is, albeit adding more of a community focus than the larger scale approach of Mayor Nutter.

Reynolds Brown gives credit for keeping Greenworks intact to council president Clarke, who decided to continue the Committee on the Environment. The council president has the power to disband council committees.

“The transition from Nutter to Kenney

You always have to look out for those behind you.”

— bl ondell reynolds brown, former Philadelphia Councilmember

was punctuated by president Clarke underscoring and believing that the committee was still worthy,” she says.

In 2019, with Kenney’s first term coming to an end and the Greenworks plan continuing to make strides in renewable energy efficiency, waste and tree canopy, Reynolds Brown decided to retire. At this time Gilmore Richardson, who had returned from college years earlier and had worked her way up to Reynolds Brown’s chief of staff from an intern, began considering a career as a Philadelphia politician herself.

Although Reynolds Brown definitely thought of Gilmore Richardson as her successor, it was the people ringing Gilmore Richardson’s phone off the hook telling her to run that got her to do it.

First, she went to her husband to make

sure it was the right move for their family.

When he told her it was “now or never,” she went to the councilmember for her advice.

“You always have to look out for those behind you,” Reynolds Brown explains.

“That’s my training as an African-American woman. And here was an opportunity to be a part of what I consider legacy pushing. Encouraging a young woman who held every position in my office except public relations. It was a huge opportunity.”

In 2020, Gilmore Richardson was sworn into office along with a re-elected Mayor Kenney and a historic slate of new councilmembers, including Kendra Brooks, who was the first councilmember in seven decades to win an election outside of a major party. Of course, the excitement of this reelection was short-lived as only a AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented shutdown.

Even though Gilmore Richardson traded in the gilded City Council Chambers for virtual meetings, she still managed to continue the legacy laid before her as the new chair of the Committee on the Environment, which she took over from Reynolds Brown.

A major part of this legacy continuum was the creation of the newly-formed Environmental Justice Advisory Commission.

Building on the awareness that her daughter instilled in Blondell her about the need for Reynolds Brown (left) inspired environmental justice in Katherine Gilmore 2008, Reynolds Brown Richardson during a speech crafted a bill that passed when Gilmore in 2019 by City Council Richardson was to formally create the just 15 years old.

Environmental Justice Advisory Commission. As chair on the Committee for the Environment, Gilmore Richardson took a lead role with the administration and colleagues to make this an official part of city government in 2022, ushering the formal launch of the commission.

The daunting task of giving this commission the resources and power that it needs to be effective is not lost on Gilmore Richardson.

“Issues like the tree cutting in Cobbs Creek are why we need a whole government approach to environmental justice,” she explains. “Mandating collaboration would have prevented our shock and dismay that somewhere in city government someone approved a plan that has led to a decrease in our tree canopy and would have addressed the lack of knowledge and understanding around this process.”

Earlier this year, Gilmore Richardson asked Mayor Kenney to establish an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice. Last month, he announced his commitment to do so.

Departments will now need to work collaboratively, getting input from the new Environmental Justice Advisory Commission and new Environment Justice staff that Gilmore Richardson has helped to secure funding for, embedding a governance structure into the city that is dedicated to ensuring we are all working together to achieve an environmentally just future.

This funding included $206,000 in the city budget for the Office of Sustainability to hire a Chief Resilience Officer, who will 22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 2022

be a key governmental organizer for the Environmental Justice Advisory Commission.

Gilmore Richardson is very optimistic about the large amounts of funding that are part of the Biden administration’s Covid-relief measures and Build Back Better agenda. She’s also a firm believer in the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which ensures that 40% of all funding to improve the U.S. environment goes directly to communities designated as “environmental justice communities.”

Gilmore Richardson has also become the self-appointed champion and educator in City Council on the circular economy, an economic concept where manufacturers and retail businesses eliminate waste, reusing materials and products as much as possible, thereby limiting extraction and reducing waste to landfills while also improving economic opportunity.

She continues to fight for more awareness and funding to be put into businesses that are adopting circular practices and moving toward zero waste. When asked about the Office of Sustainability’s recent promotion of their Zero Waste Partnership Micro Grant, which intends to open more opportunities for BIPOC businesses especially but only dedicates paltry grants of $250 to $1,000, she was circumspect.

“As a city we have to ensure that we are able to adequately fund the work we know we need to do in Philadelphia,” she contends. “I remember having to explain [the circular economy] in last year’s budget cycle. But we have to continue to educate on

these issues so that my colleagues understand why this is important and why I’m pushing for money for all of this.”

And a big part of that comes down to the priorities set forth in the next mayor’s race, which is set to begin at the end of this year, leading up to the election in November 2023.

Thinking back to how much has changed from the Reynolds Brown era to Gilmore Richardson’s, the women almost in unison bring up the flooding of I-676 in September 2021 from Hurricane Ida. They both make the salient point that when Reynolds Brown and Mayor Nutter were advocating for Greenworks in 2008, Philadelphians were not seeing the immediate effects of climate change. Now they are.

Given the urgency of the moment, both for the environmental and social protection and progression of Philadelphia, both women hope future mayoral administrations continue to press sustainability advancements and act proactively against climate change.

Gilmore Richardson explains: “We need to ensure that our next mayor knows and recognizes the importance of this issue and is willing to work with the residents of Philadelphia to continue to build trust. And that they are ready to invest in this issue in a serious way moving forward.”

Reynolds Brown echoes this.

“Don’t put them on the back burner,” she says of environmental issues. “Put them at the forefront of this next election. And ensure that people understand why it’s important for us moving forward.” ◆

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RETROSPECTIVE

ISSUE

REVOLUTION, EVOLUTION Sustainable businesses of the 2000s paved the way for the innovative ventures of today

S

story by marilyn anthony

uccessful businesses always start by filling a need or relieving a “pain point” for a target market.

In Grid’s launch year 2008, when sustainability and “going green” were working their way into the common lexicon and Michael Nutter was elected Philadelphia’s mayor on a sustainability platform, the pain point was really located in the consumer’s conscience.

Businesses like the Big Green Earth Store, first located in Old City and then on South Street, saw the need for reducing plastic by offering household products in refillable packaging.

Fair Food, fueled by the advocacy of Judy Wicks and the White Dog Cafe, was supplying a growing demand for farm-to-table food for both consumers and restaurants. The Energy Co-op was leveraging a recentlyderegulated energy market and increasing renewable energy capacity, made possible by renewable energy credits, to provide sustainable energy to Philadelphia homes.

SAVA Fashion was making the case for high-quality slow fashion made in Philadelphia. And Weavers Way and Mariposa Food Co-op continued to give life to the concept of local, sustainable grocery stores.

Fast forward to 2022 and that same pain point could not be more evident.

Between Philly’s littered streets and a global plastic crisis, we have no choice but to reduce packaging. With greenhouse gas emissions leading us to irreversible harm by 2030 unless we take meaningful action, renewable ener26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M A P R IL 20 22

gy can no longer be a luxury of the well-resourced and well-informed. And with fast food and fast fashion wreaking havoc on our waste streams and manufacturing production, not to mention supply chains, we need global alternatives guided by local knowledge.

Happily, for Philadelphia, in 2022 sustainable consumers have more options than ever before.

New shop on the block The Big Green Earth Store closed over a decade ago, but the market for a neighborhood store where you can get home goods without the packaging has only expanded.

A for-profit business with a mission to make it easier to “reduce, reuse, recycle” may sound implausible. After all, corporations have built wealth by extracting and exploiting resources recklessly. But a new generation of entrepreneurs are hoping to prove it is possible to “do well and do good.”

Emily Rodia, co-owner of the low-waste and package-free retail store Good Buy Supply, opened the store in 2020 to meet that consumer demand for products like cleaning and personal care supplies without plastic packaging. But she also sees the need for reducing consumption in general.

“What we’re trying to get across is buy less, but buy better,” she explains.

Rodia views her shop as “the new kind of general store,” designed to serve neighborhood needs.

“We want to gain customers without pushing consumerism and we certainly

don’t want people to over-consume our products,” she says.

Subscription services, easy “use and return’’ systems, “buy one, get one” retailing, ecologically-minded sourcing, regional suppliers and bulk food access are all practices consumers have adopted for convenience.

The packaging reduction tech startup The Rounds is expanding home delivery service to compete with the mega-corporate model. As their advertising cheekily bids adieu to the practices of Amazon with the tagline “Bye, Bye Bezos,” they are attempting to soothe the often conflicting consumer pain points of convenience and sustainability. Their bulk buying business model not only allows for reduced packaging home delivery, but their platform allows a consumer to, like the old infomercial tagline, “set it and forget it” through weekly orders.

Shortly after becoming a mom, Bo Zhao felt overwhelmed by the choices, cost and clutter of baby supplies. Her creative coping solution was to launch Baby Gear Group (Grid #148, September 2021) in 2020, an online marketplace to promote sharing over buying.

Zhao recalls, “We all have a natural feeling for what is wasteful and we try not to be that … I knew a key component of my business had to be making the sustainable choice, the easy choice.”

Zhao believes younger generations want to take action with their consumption habits. For her customers specifically, she thinks, “the picture is becoming clearer for millennials having children. What are we

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: G . W I D M A N / V I S I T P H I L LY; C O U R T E S Y R E T R I E V R ; C H R I S B A K E R E V E N S ; C O U R T E S Y G O O D B U Y S U P P LY

Clockwise from far left: Customers shop at Weavers Way Co-op in Chestnut Hill, opened in 2010; a Retrievr worker picks up hard-to-recycle items; The Resource Exchange founder Karyn Gerred with one of her craft supplies; Good Buy Supply offers low-waste household products.

What we’re trying to get across is buy less, but buy better.”

— emily rodia, Good Buy Supply co-owner

going to do to protect their future?”

Zhao faced the competition of existing consignment shops, thrift stores and an informal network of hand-me-downs for baby clothes and equipment. She knew from consumer surveys that at least 80% of parents had used some method to shop for secondhand items. But sifting through thrift stores or driving to yard sales can take time.

Zhao figured that creating an online marketplace with subscription options on high-quality “pre-loved” items would save time and money, while forming a supportive community—things that would appeal to young parents. So far it’s working, but Zhao is still trying to attract enough subscribers to turn a profit.

Slowing down a frenetic economy Maintaining core values while building a bottom line is a constant struggle. Consumers care about price and convenience, about where and how goods are produced, and about how the people who make, transport and sell these goods are treated.

That’s a lot to consider.

But the recent efforts of savvy innovators have given rise to several new enterprises that make living sustainably in Philly more possible, practical, and when weighed against hidden costs, worth the price.

Retrievr CEO Kabira Stokes knows firsthand what it takes to find the balance in business.

With a background in public policy AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

and workforce development, she joined Retrievr, an on-demand household waste collection service for used electronics and clothing, based on her belief that “the best way to divert the huge flow of electronics and textile waste away from landfills was to collect it at the source—where people live.”

Three years ago, Retrievr began providing residential pickups in Philadelphia.

Initially, the business had to figure out how to make collection affordable and efficient, since the weekly model used by trash haulers didn’t make sense. Retrievr landed on scheduled pickups with a sliding fee scale based on the type of items to be recycled.

For Stokes, the next challenge was “getting the word out we’re here.”

But the even bigger challenge was the lack of recycling infrastructure for textiles. While the electronics industry has generated certified downstream recyclers, for fabric recycling, “it’s still the Wild West,” says Stokes.

“We’re at the very beginning of a revolution in the way we take back and reprocess textiles,” she says.

This is a far cry from 2008 when brands like SAVA were fighting against fast fashion.

The development of an ecosystem of textile recycling and quality, sustainable clothing brands, covered by Samantha Wittchen in Grid’s January 2022 issue, have given rise to an interdependent sector of businesses including Grant Blvd, Lobo Mau, Fabscrap and The Big Favorite.

Karyn Gerred, who opened The Resource Exchange in 2009, has been promoting “pre-loved” materials for years.

“Our intent was to fill a gap in Philadelphia’s green infrastructure by taking in materials that thrift stores and used materials outlets didn’t accept,” Gerred explains. Her nonprofit accepts and sells all sorts of salvage from design trades, theater and crafts that were previously trashed. ”We have everything from two-by-fours to glitter.”

When she lived in the Bay Area, Gerred sourced many of her art materials from Scrap, a creative reuse center in San Francisco. She opened The Resource Exchange after relocating to Philly.

It may seem like a good problem to have, but managing expansion is a challenge.

“We want to stay true to only taking in things we can recirculate into the local economy,” Gerred says. “And as an organization, balance concerns for paying staff a living wage, providing equitable community 28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 2022

access and selling our materials at low cost.”

Providing more choice seems to have had a positive impact on other sectors in Philadelphia. David and Michele Bloovman started Circle Compost in 2016. The Bloovmans felt there was room in Philly for another composting company in addition to Bennett Compost, founded in 2009, comparing it to a Burger King vs. McDonald’s marketing strategy.

“With only one choice, consumers see it as a ‘yes or no’ choice to compost,” David explains. “But when there are multiple offerings, it’s no longer a question of ‘to compost or not to compost,’ the decision becomes ‘who do I want to compost with?’”

What has resulted is a friendly competition, not a battle over price or services.

And as David says, both companies have the same long-term goal: “to get more Philadelphians composting, keep more waste out of the landfills and ultimately contribute to cleaner city neighborhoods.”

[People] have to go on the journey themselves. I can only plant the seed to make a sustainable life more possible.” tim bennett founder of Bennett Compost Economies of scale As businesses grow and generate more revenue, the conventional wisdom is that prices are supposed to drop for the consumer. Setting prices as a business scales is a thorny issue, and for values-driven businesses, especially those in food and consumerpackaged goods, price sensitivity is especially hard to overcome.

Even though the demand and desire for local food and local services continued to rise in the 2010s, Fair Food was forced to shutter its landmark location in the Reading Terminal and cease all operations in 2018.

As much as restaurants and the consumers wanted locally-grown food on their plate, what they were willing to pay did not al-

ways meet the market need.

Dylan Baird, cofounder and CEO of Philly Foodworks, an online CSA and local foods distributor, sums up why this can be a hurdle for sustainable businesses to attract more widespread support.

“We’re all trained to shop on price, so getting past that is really hard,” he says.

Often Philly Foodworks customers, like Baird himself, have to believe there’s more at stake to spend the extra change.

What prompted Baird to cofound Philly Foodworks was a deep mistrust of the current industrial food system and a concern that at some future time it will collapse.

He adds that while many local food businesses have tried to spur demand for local markets in Philly, some ethical consumers can fall victim to the greenwashing large grocers and brands implement. This makes it hard for a small food business to compete and to go beyond the niche of “locavores” to reach a broader customer base.

It’s not just price but volume that these small business owners fret over.

Weavers Way took a much more aggressive approach to scaling while still maintaining the community consciousness and collectivism it was founded on.

Between 2007 and today, Weavers Way established two farms, opened a Chestnut Hill location in 2010, expanded the original Mount Airy store in 2016 and opened an Ambler location in 2017. They also lent their expertise and insight—part of the ethos of co-ops—to assist Mariposa Food Co-op in their expansion to a new store in West Philadelphia as well as provide guidance on the development of the South Philly Food Co-op and the Kensington Community Food Co-op (KCFC).

KCFC opened in 2019, nearly 10 years after planning and fundraising began. Since the neighborhood was officially recognized as a food desert, convincing neighbors of the need for a grocery store wasn’t necessary.

But educating them about what a co-op is and how it operates is an ongoing process.

Interim general manager Lauren Lyons first became involved with the co-op model at the former Creekside Co-op in Elkins Park.

For Lyons, co-ops embody many things of great importance to her: “the convenience of healthy foods available in one location, the sense of family among staff, and the fact that the co-op is owned by the community.”

KCFC strives to offer all of this while addressing a complex challenge, as Lyon says,

“to reframe the way people think about food and what it should cost … Why bananas at KCFC cost 99 cents, not 39 cents.”

“We’re buying from sustainably-minded companies and making sure growers are paid a living wage,” explains Lyons.

As Weavers Way did for food, the Energy Co-op served as the nucleus of Philadelphia’s renewable energy market. This connection makes sense given that the Energy Co-op was started in 1979 by Weavers Way members seeking cooperative buying power for oil for heating. By the 1990s the Energy Co-op went city-wide and added electricity to its portfolio.

And as renewable energy has increased both federally and regionally, the Energy Co-op’s collective buying power helped power tens of thousands of homes in the region with renewable electricity and renewable natural gas.

As this market was established and grew, so did the industries in Philadelphia. Now companies like Inspire Energy provide Philadelphia homes with buying options to support renewable wind and solar energy.

And companies like Solar States, Exact Solar and Paradise Energy Solutions install solar panels on Philadelphia homes at accelerated rates. It’s also a help that the Philadelphia Energy Authority has also partnered with Solar States to create the group solar purchasing and rental incentive program Solarize Philly.

Looking beyond 2022 Small businesses and their customers can only do so much on their own.

These entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas for how the city could help small businesses flourish while supporting a waste-reducing circular economy.

Moving reuse higher up on the priority list for all kinds of materials would improve waste reduction. Offering tax credits for

obtaining B Corp certification, providing a single web portal for businesses to navigate and complete the city’s bureaucratic requirements would save time and money.

Through marketing and tourism, the city can position Philadelphia as a green destination that celebrates local businesses.

Peicha Chang, owner of Vault & Vine—a locally-sourced floral shop, café and event space with sustainability at its core—was delighted that Philadelphia did not get the Amazon headquarters deal. “I’d love to see a ‘Buy Fresh, Buy Local’-style campaign with a louder voice than Amazon,” she says, to woo locals and visitors to support Philly’s storefront businesses.

Other things in Philadelphia’s favor include its population density and the relative ease of transportation, making for a more efficient urban collection and distribution system. The robust community of farmers, artisans and producers in and around the city is invaluable. It’s not nearly as expensive to launch a business in Philly as in New York City. And because the economy is not dominated by one or two industries, there is more opportunity for “closed loop” collaboration among companies sharing resources by turning waste to productive use.

Despite these advantages, poverty, unemployment, inequality and our aging infrastructure are intractable forces that hinder efforts to move to a more sustainable economy. As long as many households struggle to meet the basic needs for food, clothing and safe shelter, the goods and services of green businesses are beyond their means.

At craft brewhouse Triple Bottom Brewing, cofounder and CEO Tess Hart talks about this push and pull, too. The existential challenge between “pushing the mission and pushing the product.”

“We want to tell our story without being preachy, because fundamentally beer should be fun,” says Hart of her certified B Corp, which is powered by wind energy and composts the grain it uses to make beer.

Retrievr CEO Kabira Stokes and Fabscrap regional manager Lindsey Troop envision an opportunity to focus on the pressing need for textile recycling.

Stokes believes that, by utilizing former industrial buildings and unemployed or underemployed residents, “Philadelphia could become a major East Coast player in recycling and upcycling,” creating living wage green jobs in a high-demand industry. Our city can choose to invest in ways that reimagine and rebuild better as a way to restore the aging built environment and address poverty through sustainable job development.

Consumers concerned for the present and the future are right to make demands on companies they support: living wages, renewable energy use, low carbon footprint, sustainable sourcing, waste reduction, to name a few. But are we willing to pay for these more costly business practices?

Tim Bennett founded Bennett Compost in 2009 after he read about composting and thought it was worthwhile. He started collecting kitchen food waste from interested friends and a company evolved.

Bennett Compost now serves about 5,700 households across the city. Still, Bennett says he’s done hundreds of hours at farmers markets trying to answer the question “Why should I pay for this?”—and he has never convinced one person who asks.

“They have to go on the journey themselves,” Bennett explains. “They have to arrive at the value on their own. I can only plant the seed to make a sustainable life more possible.” ◆

AP RIL 20 22 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

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MEET OUR SPEAKERS Mark Alan Hughes Former Philadelphia Sustainability Director

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RETROSPECTIVE

ISSUE

A DIFFERENT PATH A cross-country road trip evolved into a lifestyle for this former sustainability professional story by sophia d. merow

B

efore #vanlife became a hashtag, or “Nomadland” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Kirsty Halliday faced niggling doubts about her path forward.

Sitting in her windowless office at the (since shuttered) construction firm Greensaw Design & Build, she wondered, “What am I doing?”

At night, in her LEED Platinum apartment in Fishtown, the Scottish transplant found herself plotting a national parkstudded route across her adopted country.

Halliday had long wanted to road trip her way around the U.S., and if not for the Great Recession, she might never have taken the plunge.

An environmental studies major at the University of Plymouth in South West England, Halliday worked for nine years in Edinburgh as an environment and hygiene systems manager for the Swedish timber, pulp and paper company SCA. In 2004 she was transferred to Philadelphia to roll out environmental policies in SCA’s newly acquired businesses stateside. Laid off amidst 32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M A P R IL 20 22

the economic downturn in 2009, Halliday followed nine months of international travel with a stint at the short-lived financial startup e3bank.

By the time she landed at Greensaw in 2012 as chief operating officer, Halliday was dipping into savings to cover day-to-day expenses, feeling a disconnect between the work and her background, while craving nature, space and simplicity. “I can’t not do this,” Halliday soon concluded. She needed to get out.

So she took out a loan, went to Fretz RV in Souderton, Bucks County, and bought the first motorhome she saw: a gently-used Class C with a stand-up shower and a comfortable bed.

“I was just going to leave town for five months, go across country, come back and then probably get a job and move back into an apartment in Philly,” Halliday recalls. “But I didn’t. It’s been almost nine years now.”

Halliday has visited 35 national parks in those nine years. She has circumnavigated Crater Lake eight or nine times, staffed a general store in Yellowstone and spent a winter awestruck by auroras in Alaska. She has done

time at the same Amazon warehouse as Frances McDormand’s character in “Nomadland,” harvested sugar beets in North Dakota and managed a resort in Oregon.

Debt free, plugged into Xscapers (a community of working-aged RVers) and content with her “little box on wheels,” she no longer feels pressure to chase fancy titles or big paychecks. She looks instead for experiences, for opportunities to go places and meet people.

“Pretty much any job I get asked to do,” Halliday says, “I’ll take a go at it.”

And although she fretted early on about her vehicle’s appetite for gasoline, Halliday has since settled into a no-stress mindfulness of environmental footprint. She runs errands en route rather than making special trips; she uses LED lights, and sparingly; and she only ever dumps her gray water in the sewer, never on public lands. She has a modest 200-watt solar panel that tops up her batteries when she’s parked.

“Your resource use is pretty minimal,” she says of the lifestyle.

Vanlife is not for everyone, Halliday concedes. Those less outgoing than Halliday risk loneliness; those more squeamish may be deterred by having to dispose of their own poop. And don’t even get Halliday started on the headache of accessing and affording healthcare.

But “being out in places where it’s so wide open, and there’s a road stretching as far as you can see, and there’s no people around,” she says, “it’s incredibly freeing just to give yourself the space to think, ‘What do I want to do?’” ◆

P H OTO G R A H P Y C O U R T E S Y K I R S T Y H A L L I DAY

Kirsty Halliday pictured (left) beneath an aurora, and posing at the Midway Geyser Basin at Yellowstone National Park (above).

Ambler • Chestnut Hill • Mt. Airy

Community-owned markets, open to everyone.

www.weaversway.coop

When the water rises, build a better bridge Becky Lyne (MES `10) always knew she wanted to work for the environment, so she majored in ecology and went to work as an environmental consultant.

But while her work allowed her to get hands-on and make an impact, she knew that a master’s degree would give her more opportunities and a broader knowledge base.

“Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies (MES) program offers a lot for anybody, whether you are looking to fill technical gaps or interested in policy,” she says. “I saw this credential as an opportunity to advance my career and round out my environmental studies background.”

Becky Lyne Director of Quality Management; Senior Environmental Technical Manager for Northeast, Michael Baker International

Virtual Café Join the MES program team from 12-1 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month for an online chat about your interests and goals.

Log in with us.

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Now Director of Quality Management and Senior Environmental Technical Manager for the Northeast at Michael Baker International, Becky assists government transportation agencies as they go through the regulatory process at state, local, and federal levels.

“What’s being discussed right now in our industry is how can we plan for our public assets to recognize and acknowledge climate change, while spending public money wisely,” she explains. “There is obviously a public need for bridges, so how are we going to solve this? Those are the challenges I like most about my job.”

To learn more about how Becky balances the interests of public funds with those of natural resources, visit:

www.upenn.edu/grid