Baye Adofo-Wilson grew up in Paterson, N.J., about 20 minutes away from the rough and tumble of Newark, a city in constant need of rehabilitation and revitalization. In 1999, he took an interest in Newark’s Lincoln Park Coast neighborhood, an area that had been home to black artists and jazz music, and started the Lincoln…

April is usually a busy time for Brenda Palms-Barber. Bee season has started and that means tending to the beehives owned by her 2-year-old organization, Sweet Beginnings, LLC. What’s unique about Palms-Barber’s bees is that they are urban-raised, creating their honeycombs in the heart of Chicago. Once their honey is ripe, Palms-Barber and her employees…

What do you get when you combine phat beats and positive rhymes with organic food and alternative energy? Zakiya Harris’ music festival and environmental workshop, Grind for the Green (G4G). Harris has used hip-hop music to encourage young people in the San Francisco Bay area to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle. African-American and Hispanic youth,…

The green movement is about more than celebrities driving hybrid cars and building green homes. It’s about everyday people around the country doing grassroots work to reshape their streets, blocks, neighborhoods and cities. Through strategies ranging from hip-hop to children’s television to beekeeping—yes, beekeeping!—these 10 community leaders are making the green movement accessible, fun and…

When Karen Monahan became a community organizer for the Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) in 2006, the notion of green jobs hadn’t yet made its way to the mainstream imagination. Monahan says working in a green industry in Minnesota, where there wasn’t a real green movement, was still very much a new idea.   By…

Kandi Mossett grew up running wild among the spectacular peaks and valleys of the North Dakota Badlands. She remembers spending most of her childhood days on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation swimming and climbing with friends. “I guess that’s probably why I’ve had this passion for doing something outdoors,” Mossett, 29, says.  But among the…

As a kid growing up in Hobbs, N.M., 27-year-old Juan Reynosa saw the firsthand effects of heavy industry on his local community. “Just growing up there as a child, I saw the mismanagement of these oil industries.” In Hobbs, the smell of gas always filled the air, as a constant reminder that the small town…

When LaDonna Redmond found out, nearly 10 years ago, that her then 1-year-old son had several serious food allergies, she set out to find a healthy diet that would not trigger his allergies. At the time, she knew nothing, and cared nothing, about going green. “It wasn’t that I ignored the environment,” she says. “I…