Introducing high school students from West and Southwest Philadelphia to a variety of environmental occupations, the new Penn Medicine Leadership in Nature (LeadIN) summer program included field trips to locations like Sankofa Farm at Bartram’s Garden. Shown here are the 17 members of the program’s 2025 cohort and their mentors. (Photos: Hoag Levins)
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Driven by the idea that access to nature is linked to better health and community stability—and supported by Penn Medicine, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and 22 other community organizations in West and Southwest Philadelphia—a group of high school students in the inaugural Deeply Rooted Leadership in Nature (LeadIN) program completed a five week curriculum in late July. The program immersed them in neighborhood greening, horticulture, built environment remediation, and community organizing.
Center for Health Justice Deeply Rooted managers of the LeadIN program: (Top) Nicole Thomas, EdD, MBA, Director; James Wright, MBA, Project Manager for Strategy and Operations; (Bottom) LDI Senior Fellow Eugenia South, MD, MSHP, Faculty Director; Janaiya Reason, MPH, Community Engagement Manager; and Dianne Uwayo, MPH, Community Engagement Coordinator.
“At the Center for Health Justice and the Urban Health Lab, we’ve been doing this work for about five years now—planting trees, improving vacant lots, and distributing money to community groups to help them achieve their green goals. Our greatest challenge is: How do we sustain that work? It’s been clear to us that our young people are the answer to that question, and that’s where the Leadership in Nature idea came from,” said James Wright, MBA, as he opened the July 24 evening session at ACHIEVEability, a community-based organization at 59th and Market Streets that celebrated the end of the first phase of the LeadIN program. One of the managers of LeadIN, he is also a Project Manager for Strategy and Operations at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Justice.
LDI Senior Fellow Eugenia South, MD, MSHP, Faculty Director at the Center for Health Justice, is nationally renowned for her rigorous “greening” research using place-based interventions, including vacant lot greening, abandoned house remediation, tree planting, and structural repairs to homes to improve neighborhood environments. Her randomized controlled trials found that neighborhood greening reduced violent crime up to 29 percent and that people living within a quarter mile of greened projects had a 41.5 percent decrease in feelings of depression and nearly 63 percent reduction in self-reported poor mental health.
Deeply Rooted has thus far planted 1,039 trees, turned 1,073 blighted and vacant lots into clean and green spaces, supported workforce development efforts around commercial corridor maintenance, and awarded 79 Community Green Grants totaling $212,000 to support residents’ visions for their neighborhoods.
In late June, its first LeadIN cohort of 17 students—from ninth to eleventh grade in six schools across West and Southwest Philadelphia—came together to begin a mix of daily mentoring, classroom presentations, and field trips to conduct photovoice studies of the local neighborhoods’ natural environment.
Insights and Discussion Points
Academic photovoice studies are a method of qualitative research that use photographs to gather information that can provide insights and discussion points about social phenomena, cultural practices, historical events, and lived experiences.
After receiving digital cameras and instructions from a professional photographer on how to use them, the LeadIN students were given a choice of two themes for their photovoice projects:
What greening idea do you think would improve your neighborhood, and how would you make that a reality?
How do you think young people can help protect and care for green spaces in their communities?
Throughout the next five weeks, in the blistering summer heat, they took their cameras on field trips around their own neighborhoods as well as to farming, horticultural, and other greening venues around Philadelphia. Their final photographic presentations—on large poster boards—were displayed for a packed conference room full of parents and siblings at a July 24 event.
Throughout the Coming Year
Moving forward, the cohort will come together once a month throughout the next year. In groups of four, they will work to help activate a mini-park project being built by Deeply Rooted.
“The goal of this second phase of LeadIN is for the students to learn about planning, budgeting, and goal setting, as well as to further build their understanding and skills in ethical leadership, public speaking, and teamwork,” said Dianne Uwayo, MPH, community engagement coordinator in the Urban Health Lab’s Deeply Rooted. “Another focus is to expose the students and their cameras to more potential ‘green career’ opportunities through additional field trips, speakers, and nature-based activities.”
Center for Health Justice Director Nicole Thomas, EdD, MBA, noted that, “We would love to be able to offer this program to a new cohort of students from our neighing communities annually. That would require additional funding. We have also gathered so many great ideas about strengthening and expanding LeadIN from youth, community partners, and members of the Center for Health Justice team. We will actively seek additional funding to keep this program going.”
At one of the early LeadIN meetings, Penn Center for Health Justice Community Engagement Coordinator Dianne Uwayo, MPH, leads a discussion around the idea of ethical photography, or the taking of photographs guided by a set of moral principles aimed at respecting the rights, dignity, and well-being of the subjects, viewers, and environments involved.
All 17 of the LeadIN students were provided with their own new digital camera. A professional photographer from the University of Pennsylvania led them in a session to help set up the devices and understand some basic principles of photographic vision, lighting, and related imaging logistics.
Addressing one of the sessions was Asha-Le Davis, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Trees Manager who leads the organization’s Tree Tender program across Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery Counties. She explained PHS’ programs and workshops aimed at teaching neighborhood groups how to plant and care for trees and other landscape greenery along their streets and open spaces.
Designed to foster nature literacy and leadership skills development, the LeadIN program’s classroom sessions featured interactive presentations from professionals in a range of different fields. Here, the students meet with Raina Merchant, MD, MSHP, Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer of the Perelman School of Medicine.
Field trips were designed to sensitize the students to the different environmental conditions found in neighborhoods in West and Southwest Philadelphia. Some locations, like this one, represent the challenge of local greening where there is little of it.
Other areas, often in the same neighborhoods, have residents who, often working in small coordinated groups, have fostered tree canopies, sidewalk gardens, and a sense of refreshing calm along their streets.
Located just North of University City in West Philadelphia, the Mantua Civic Association (MCA) is a Registered Community Organization (RCO), hosting meetings and workshops where residents can participate in discussions and group activities related to zoning, city planning, and neighborhood greening projects. Welcoming the LeadIN visitors, MCA President De’Wayne Drummond explained the organization’s Youth Ambassadors Program that is involved in neighborhood environmental education and work.
Created on converted vacant lots, abandoned house plots, and other unused corners of neighborhoods, mini-parks play a major role in greening initiatives around Philadelphia. Here, LeadIN students on a field trip experience one of those in half a vacant house plot in Mantua.
One of the little mentioned benefits that come from greening a neighborhood is that more of its residents become interested in plants — a fact that Cherron Perry-Thomas has taken advantage of with her bustling People and Plant Cafe & Shop on Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia. Recognized by Philadelphia Magazine as one of the City’s Best Garden Stores, the Cafe & Shop focuses on promoting wellness through plants and holistic products. Perry-Thomas welcomed the LeadIN visitors and pointed to her own success demonstrating that horticultural knowledge and experience can lead to various kinds of career and commercial opportunities.
LeadIN students wandered the Cafe & Shop and its siderooms offering informative arrays of different kinds of plants that could be mixed in greening arrangements in outside locations or as part of interior houseplant groupings.
The LeadIN program is designed to foster and support the accumulation and retention of knowledge and insights about a broad range of subjects related to greening and community organizing. Individual journals play a big role in that.
Everywhere they went, LeadIN students took time to write in their journals and reflect on what they and their colleagues were experiencing and recording.
Another LeadIN field trip went to the Sankofa Farm at Bartram’s Garden, a 3.5 acre African-focused urban farm that emphasizes crops linked to the African Diaspora and support for food sovereignty and cultural connections in Southwest Philadelphia. It is both an industrial sales company to the local market and a community farming center with 60 family plots.
Sankofa Co-Director Ty Holmberg led the LeadIN students on a tour of the farm’s operations and densely-packed crop fields and orchard trees that hung with the early summer growths of figs, cherries, pecans and pawpaws. More than five dozen different crops are grown here—including small plots of upland rice, cotton, tobacco, and peanuts to demonstrate what those plants that played such a large role in African American history look like.
The last week of the LeadIN summer session focused on learning the organizational thinking and physical skills involved in planning and creating a photovoice photo story on a poster board.
Deeply Rooted Project Manager James Wright, MBA, coached the students on graphic design and caption writing to create an interesting, coherent story about what the images show and why that story’s insights are important.
The posters were mounted around the conference room as the parents and siblings of the LeadIN students began arriving, many expressing surprise and delight at the quality of the photographs.
The lessons learned and skills acquired during the summer session will now come into further use as the LeadIN program continues throughout the coming year with once-a-month workshops and field trips. Students will help plan and activate a community mini-park built by Deeply Rooted as they continue their journey toward leadership and environmental expertise.
The conference room at the ACHIEVEability, a community-based organization center at 59th and Market Streets.
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