Mission
The New Haven Ecology Project, better known as Common Ground, is a center for learning and leadership, inviting people across ages and identities to connect to their urban environment, build community, grow into their full potential, and contribute to a just and sustainable world. We work toward this mission through active, authentic learning rooted in justice and our environment: a farm, in a forest, in a city.
Needs Statement
1. Continue to develop our site as a critical community resource. Common Ground's site is at the root of all we do. Recognizing this, we developed a 10-year master site plan to steward and develop this unique place. Six years later we have completed most of the physical improvements and are now working to solidify a new set of strategic priorities that will take advantage of the new buildings and improved ecosystems on the site. The rate of expansion requires us to upgrade our internal systems, such as talent management, communication tools, and evaluation systems, to keep pace with the increased demands for more high quality work.2. Ensuring that our students succeed in college. Common Ground students have made remarkable strides -- reflected in college acceptance and graduation rates. Yet, getting these students into college is not enough. Our students need support during the college admissions process, and as they transition to college -- requiring a $750 investment in each graduate.3. Sustaining growth and diversity of our community environmental programs. Offering life-changing environmental learning experiences to all children and families requires financial commitment. For instance, it costs $150 to fund each of the 250+ classrooms of students who visit for school field trips each year. 4. The ripple effect. Common Ground works with 22 New Haven Public Schools partners in designing, building and maintaining outdoor educational spaces through school gardens and bird habitats. Common Ground convenes a network of urban high schools in the Northeast U.S. as a learning community called 'Teaching Our Cities.'5. Moving healthy, local food from farm to table. The 8,000 pounds of produce we grow each year is a real investment in food security and community education. Ensuring that this food gets to those who need it most, and that it has the maximum educational impact, requires $150,000 in the next year.
Impact Statement
Planting seeds, growing leaders, cultivating community. The diverse Common Ground community of children, young people, and adults is doing transformational work on many levels in New Haven. Last year, the four-year graduation rate at Common Ground High School surpassed the state average and for the past five years 95-100% of our graduates were accepted to college. When the children in our after-school programs and summer camps go home, more than 50% are more willing to try new, healthy foods, and more than 90% demonstrate new sustainable behaviors, according to surveys of their parents. We see our 20 acre site -- an urban farm, at the base of a forested state park, within a city -- as an irreplaceable community resource, and as a catalyst for community change. More than 15,000 people visited Common Ground for an educational program last year.We are compelled by our mission and values to step into the larger New Haven community, to create partnerships and leverage other nonprofits' strengths to build a model that can help strengthen others around the country. For example, Common Ground's Schoolyards Program works with 22 New Haven Public Schools developing school gardens and bird habitats for educational uses - deepening students' education through a connection with the outdoors. We work with CitySeed to sustain New Haven's mobile farm market, bringing food to senior centers, public housing projects, and food insecure neighborhoods across the city. We have joined with the Urban Resource Initiative, Audubon Connecticut, the City, New Haven Public Schools, and other strong partners to create a matrix of 'urban oases' across our city -- designed to provide rich habitat for wildlife and human communities, and recently designated as one of the country's first urban wildlife refuges.
CEO statement
About a year ago, Common Ground put out a call for people to apply to be the next Executive Director. It looked like this:
"Executive Director Position, Common Ground High School, Urban Farm & Environmental Education Center is looking for its next Executive Director: A dynamic, proven organizational leader who shares our roots-deep commitment to environmental and food justice, active, authentic learning, and inclusive, equitable community. "
It took me about 5 minutes to decide that I would apply. It was a no-brainer. I had been an Executive Director before and thought I’d be a good candidate. But most importantly, I LOVED (and still love) Common Ground. My kids grew up at Common Ground. I live “right around the corner” from Common Ground. I’m an educator with a life-long commitment to educational equity. I applied confidently, and was honored to be offered the job. When I asked our Board Chair, Bob Parker, for feedback on my interviews, it was clear that my past experiences with and knowledge of Common Ground had made me a strong candidate. Common Ground is a complex organization, and I thought I totally got it. I understood the differences and relationships between the farm, school and environmental education center. I was an expert on Common Ground – or so I thought.
In the six months since I’ve been at Common Ground I’ve learned so much that I never knew. I’ve learned that Common Ground has 3 kitchens, that duck eggs make the best baked goods and that we grow produce year round in our high tunnels. But the thing that surprised me most was the number of ways that Common Ground invests in our community, through stock trading NZ apps and resources, way beyond our campus.
You see, I knew Common Ground had great programs. My own children have participated in most of them, and I love the way Common Ground weaves learning and play and respect for nature into every program. I knew Common Ground had a well-regarded, successful charter high school whose approach to learning and results I’d admired as an educator and community member. But I had no idea how much Common Ground does to bring their mission of “inviting people across ages and identities to connect to their urban environment, build community, grow into their full potential, and contribute to a just and sustainable world” to the greater New Haven community and beyond.
What I didn’t know
Common Ground has programs that specifically work to ensure that the Common Ground experience is available to more than our 224 high school students and those who can attend fee-based children’s programs on campus.
Our CT Schoolyards actively partners with 21 New Haven Public Schools to help them fund and build school gardens, schoolyard habitats and the kinds of outdoor play areas that we have onsite. This means that over 1,000 New Haven Public Schools students each year are able to participate in enrichment programs provided by Common Ground without ever stepping on to the Common Ground campus.
Field Trips is something we all think we know about Common Ground. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone in greater New Haven who doesn’t know someone who went on a field trip to Common Ground. But I never knew that Common Ground discounts the price of field trips for New Haven Public Schools to about one fourth of the actual cost. This aligns with our goal of ensuring all children in our community have meaningful outdoor learning opportunities. And it WORKS. Last year, almost 7,000 students experienced Common Ground through one of our field trip programs. Of these, 65% were from a New Haven Public School. For some of these students, this is the first time they’ve gone on a hike, cooked over a campfire or touched a frog. One of my favorite things about my job is watching the daily arrivals by school bus of students from all over New Haven and surrounding towns. Rain or shine, visiting Common Ground brings a smile to kids’ and teachers’ faces. Every Child Outside!
Teaching our Cities is a program created by our own Joel Tolman, Director of Impact and Engagement. This program brings together students, teachers, community members and leaders from 6 communities in the Northeast to form a community of practice for building capacity and sharing learnings. This project has supported the creation of high school curriculum that activate the potential of the urban environment as a learning laboratory, develop practices for urban public schools to be responsive to our cities, and grow a new, more diverse generation of environmental and community leaders.
You may be wondering…
How is Common Ground able to provide so many free or reduced cost opportunities?
Great question. This is part of a very deliberate strategy to invest in our community. Common Ground funds Schoolyards, Field Trips, Teaching our Cities, Mobile Market and our free weekend programming through a combination of philanthropic support and channeling our fee income (from summer camp, NatureYear, and other fee based programs) to support our free onsite and offsite programming.
Our on-campus fee-based programs also allow us to provide year-round jobs for a team of highly skilled environmental educators whose time, expertise and learning provide an amazing resource to the whole New Haven community through the programs described above.
Basically, any money we make on fee-based programs is re-invested in mission-aligned programming, much of it free. We also provide $50,000 per year in partial scholarships to reduce the costs of fee-based programs for families who cannot afford the full cost.
Our campus also serves as a learning lab for the nature-based play and learning spaces we have built in 23 New Haven public schools. For example, this year, we are piloting a multi-day nature learning program at Bishop Woods that draws on what we’ve learned in our NatureYear program.
I didn’t know any of this as a community member. As an ED, it makes me so proud of Common Ground and our commitment to creating a ripple effect that will reach far beyond our campus on Springside Avenue.
Board Chair Statement
Before the No Child Left Inside, the No Child Left Behind, the school gardens, the food deserts, school lunch politics, farm to table dinners, and the healthy foods nonprofits, an idealistic bunch of young and not so young teachers, farmers, and environmentalists believed they could make students better stewards of the planet and of their own bodies. Earnestly deploying maxims like "there is no away" and imbuing classes with lessons in culinary capitalism, the believers helped students to see the impact their choices had on the city of New Haven and their own personal health. And it wasn't long before they were convincing others too through summer camps, community programs, and finally a charter school. Today's culinary landscape is structured by food studies research, rich with edible options, and politically highly evolved. There is incredible range of resources now devoted to supporting a healthier planet, healthier bodies, and tastier meals. Yet there is still incredible need particularly around food choices and health, and that reality assails us everywhere. Committing to Common Ground is a promise for future generations: I'll try to make healthier choices now for a better planet later. It is the carrot over the cookie as often as possible. Or at least the carrot along with the cookie. It is a commitment to the early believers at The New Haven Ecology Project who dreamed of Common Ground and to a city that made it possible and where those healthier options and that rhetoric should be inescapable. Common Ground is, once again, growing something new, despite major public policy challenges and a difficult funding environment. With a brand new school building built with more than $2 million in private support and $8 million in public support, Common Ground has the physical facilities needed to meet the increased demand for its programs. Now, despite major financial obstacles, we remain idealistic. Together with students, their parents, and our wider community, we are tackling not just the threats to the natural environment, but the threats to our community posed by structural racism and other systems of oppression, to ensure that all members of the Common Ground community and New Haven are engaged, feel safe, and are valued in the important work of the organization.
Areas Served |
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Greater New Haven |
Areas Served Narrative
Common Ground is a resource for Greater New Haven. High school students come from 14 towns, and community program participants are even more geographically diverse. We are particularly committed to New Haven's most vulnerable residents, and to serving a diverse urban community. Nearly 65% of our high school students qualify for free/reduced lunch, as do about 75% of children's program participants.