Adam Green

1998

Adam Green

Rocking The Boat

http://www.rockingtheboat.org

Bronx, New York, United States

Education & Youth Leadership, Environment

The Bold Idea:

Rocking the Boat is a boatbuilding and environmental education program based out of the southwest Bronx, New York City. Through a hands-on alternative approach to education and youth development, Rocking the Boat addresses the need for inner city youth to achieve practical and tangible goals, relevant to both everyday life and future aspirations. This process allows inner-city high school students to acquire practical, academic, and social skills in unique ways.

Rocking the Boat runs programming in both boatbuilding and environmental education. The after school and summer programs work directly with over 100 students, all of whom receive high school credit. During the process of building a traditional wooden boat, Rocking the Boat students create something not only beautiful, but practical in their own lives, bridging urban and natural life within their neighborhoods.

This approach is mirrored in the environmental education program through direct focus on Bronx River restoration and scientific analysis, as well as through environmental action related to the South Bronx. In its forestry program, students not only harvested their own lumber, but use their hand-built boats to do native species plantings and other restoration work. This creates a sustaining cycle, where students build something from resources taken from local forests, and then use that creation to plant new habitats. This process is at the heart of Rocking the Boat’s activities, instilling its students with the power and knowledge to change the world around them step by step. Students gain a deeper awareness of their own abilities as well as the possibilities in the natural and urban world.

Biography:

Mr. Green is a native and current resident of New York City and graduated in 1996 from Vassar College with a focus on folklore and storytelling in American Culture. Though his work developing Rocking the Boat, he has received an Echoing Green Fellowship and a Union Square Award for grassroots organizing. He is a board member of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc. and the Bronx River Alliance.