Rhody Greeneers
CC4ES Founder and Executive Director Susan Shim Gorelick coined the Rhody Greeneers term. Rhody for Rhode Island; and Greeneers is a contraction of two words, Green for sustainability and ‘eers' from engineers. Rhody Greeneers are youth ( and young at heart) citizen/community change makers who participate in Y4US program, practice sustainable lifestyle as a mindful consumer, and promote environmental, social and economic justice and equity at all levels of their systems.
Y4US for Youths for Urban Sustainability
Formerly Urban Youths for Sustainability
Sustainable Food Systems as a platform
Y4US uses food systems as a skill training platform for jobs in sustainability sectors. As food is embedded in socio-cultural systems, food justice is a gateway to environmental, social and economic justice. Growing one's own food provides the most direct impactful means of ensuring environmental, social and economic sustainability.
Gardening & Urban Agriculture for Green Jobs
Y4US training focuses on gardening, following the full food paths to explore complexity and interconnectedness of food systems. Gardening is heuristic as well as communal acts that connect youths to land while discovering or redefining their cultural identification with food they grow. Building relationships help youths take ownership of their actions in the context of community or systems.
Stewardship at all levels
Y4US' emphasis on stewardship encompasses all levels from individual to community and beyond. Its outreach on nutritious and healthy cooking and eating is to cultivate an individual sustainable lifestyle. Its community environmental stewardship with tree planting and care-taking instigates social norm shifts for building regeneratively sustainable communities
Food Sovereignty & Justice for Environmental Justice & Equity
Y4US facilitates CC4ES' Rhody Grows Hope project for food security, sovereignty and justice by engaging youths at community grassroots level to explore systemic oppression through environmental, social and economic lenses integrated in food systems. Y4US is intended to help youths connect dots for comprehensive understanding of systemic oppression to lead their own transformative transition to environmental justice and equity.
CC4ES
Coalition Center for Environmental Sustainability
CC4ES builds regeneratively sustainable communities with one garden at a time. CC4ES tends to frontline communities -- communities not only socioeconomically disadvantaged but also environmentally challenged. CC4ES uses growing one's own food as a grassroots community mobilizer to platform collective shifts necessary for cultivating community-narrated and empowered regenerative sustainability. All CC4ES programs share gardening as their common thread.Â
CC4ES headquarters at Nuestro Mundo Public Charter School as its exemplary school-community collaborative garden hub -- Gardens of Second Chances -- based on its Rhody Grows Hope program.