Complete Interview Transcripts

Robin Dougherty
Executive Director, Greater Newark Conservancy

Robin Dougherty is the Executive Director of Greater Newark Conservancy, a Newark-based environmental and horticultural non-profit. She has led the team to create the environmental and ecological center, in downtown Newark, which educates inner city children on the importance of their natural urban environment. Previously, she was an educator of special needs students, and a school administrator. A Leadership New Jersey Class of 2004 graduate, and a 2007 Gustav Heningburg Fellow, Robin is a founding member and has completed two terms as president of EarthShare of New Jersey, serves on the School Leadership Team for the John F. Kennedy School for special needs and has been active in social justice issues for over 20 years.

Q. Describe some of the things the Greater Newark Conservancy does.
Dougherty: Basically that Greater Newark Conservancy runs four different types of programs, focusing on the urban environment: environmental education -- which is our largest program --community beautification and greening, which includes street tree plantings, flowers, and beautification of blocks; environmental justice advocacy, working to empower the inner city resident to help to fight the struggles in their own neighborhoods and to improve the quality of life; and job training, for high school students and for people who are interested in the field of horticulture landscaping.

Q. How did the Conservancy get started?
Dougherty: I think that twenty years ago people began to recognize that the city needed the kind of activities that the Conservancy could provide in terms of community beautification. Efforts were being made at that time to organize people by blocks, and form block associations and conduct activities that would help to bring their blocks back from the crime and poverty that they were suffering, say, thirty or forty years ago. People would organize around an activity like a street tree planting or a flower barrel planting, get to know each other, and therefore empower themselves to take back their neighborhoods.

Q. How has the mission to “green” Newark evolved?
Dougherty: There’s much more of a focus city-wide in terms of beautification activities. The new mayor (Cory Booker) has a genuine interest in beautifying Newark, and so we’re finding a lot more community-based organizations getting active. Also, the city administration itself is taking on the effort to bring back the city, bring back the tree plantings, moving toward the beautiful Newark that used to be, the Newark that people brag so much about. I think we’re making significant gains in that direction again.

Q. Describe your background and how you got involved..
Dougherty: I was an educator. I taught special education for several years, and I also worked for statewide environmental organizations. I did a lot of social justice work in other urban communities, and the fact that this job combined all of those things into one, with a great opportunity to expand and enhance the mission of the organization by building this phenomenal environmental center (the Greater Newark Conservancy’s Outdoor Learning Center) … that’s what really brought me here.

Q. How did this Outdoor Learning Center get started?
Dougherty: We first bought the building to start the environmental center in 1995, so the grand opening we held was a significant realization of dreams of so many community residents and so many of our constituents, including our staff, and our board of directors. We had been planning for many years to have this actually happen. As a result of that, the word has gotten out about the Conservancy and the kinds of programs that we’re offering, and so we’re able to serve many more constituents, many more children, many more community residents than we could previously with everything being on an outreach basis. Prior to that, everything we did involved our staff going out into the community and bringing programs to people, and you can only see so many students because you’re traveling all over the city, you’re packing your supplies and equipment. Whereas you could bring busloads of children or community residents to our center and see hundreds of people at one time.

Seeing this Center come to life was a significant thing for me personally. Having been involved in the planning for so many years, it was almost surrealistic to me. We looked at it on paper for so long, and saw architectural drawings and plans and had been working on the fundraising and talked about it and sold it to so many people, to actually see it happen was amazing, this incredible vision was finally coming true.

Q. Why is environmental science, and hands-on learning, especially important in the city?
Dougherty: There’s been a lot of talk lately about a nature deficit in children, and we definitely see that in urban children. Here we often have the chance to work with high school students, and if they don’t have any exposure to the outdoors, to the environment, they have a different way of looking at it. They see the outdoors as being a very unsafe place, as being a dirty place, and not a place where you can learn or have any fun. Often times children in this city spend their lives in apartments or in homes that have no green space. They don’t have access to a park in their neighborhood, and their only experience with being outdoors is walking to the corner and getting on the bus, going to school, being in a classroom that may not have any windows in it, a school that may not have any windows in it, and a school that has no playground, no place to play. So children are spending their entire lives in four walls, or in a bus looking out a window. And so we see this nature deficit affecting our young people, in that they aren’t interested in the environment, much less preserving the environment.

The deficit is in the hands-on activities, especially if you don’t ever take children outdoors and teach them how you interact with the environment. You can only learn so much from a book or a video or a computer screen; those things are wonderful and they’re great educational enhancements, but they cannot take the place of hands-on interdisciplinary lessons like we provide here at our outdoor learning center.

So at first a lot of children who come to the center are afraid, because they’re not used to this type of environment. They’re not used to being outdoors. They’re not used to holding worms, or butterflies, or ladybugs. But once they do that, their eyes light up, and they get so excited, I’ve heard them squeal and giggle. Then they let the worms crawl up their arms. And it’s just amazing to see this. And when you see it, you understand how important this kind of education is for our children, especially for our young children. When they get to be in high school, they already a lot have formed attitudes, and are less willing to try different things. So we are trying to educate the younger children before they get to the point later in their teen years where the roadblocks exist.

Q. How does environmental science help with issues within the city?
Dougherty: Often I’m in a room with people from an inner city, and they’re fighting environmental justice battles on the other side of the environment. Instead of being pro-active in protecting their environment, and recognizing the connection to human health, they’re often engaged when it’s a health-related matter, when the asthma rates are up, or children are being lead-poisoned, or there’s a toxic emission in their community. Often that’s when people in urban communities are getting involved. It might be better if more people got involved in the preservation and improvement and the appreciation of the environment, within the city, with the understanding that if you have open space and trees and flowers, that’s a sign of a healthy environment and a healthy neighborhood. It definitely impacts you, not only physically but emotionally and your well-being.

What we can create are green beautiful spaces that the children learn in. It’s not just about having trees or having grass. You have an opportunity to learn in these centers, but these also contribute to quality of life and health-related issues as well. You can’t have a healthy city that doesn’t have green space. And children, in our programs, learn the connection between human health, and the environment. Those are very important connections which I think all of us are learning a lot more about now than we did thirty or forty years ago. The cities are substantially behind the suburbs in terms of their opportunities to learn through the environment, and so we’re now providing a vehicle for the cities to catch up in terms of their learning potential.

Q. It seems your organization is driven to motivate or activate others, to get Newarkers to get involved in their own neighborhoods. Is that how it works?
Dougherty: We have a pretty small staff actually, but our programs engage hundreds of community members who are interested in those programs, and they see the benefit. They see in their very own blocks and their communities the direct result of something as simple as planting a flower barrel. They’ve witnessed how a “flower barrel block day” can bring people together, people who’ve lived next door to each other ten or twenty years and didn’t even know who lived next door. Didn’t know the names of the people or the names of the children on their street. So you see that type of thing happening, and you realize that you need so many ambassadors. We’ve often been called the best kept secret in Newark, and we’re trying overcome that (Laughs) because that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Q. So the effects of something like gardening go beyond beautification?
Dougherty: I would say that historically that Newark has had issues with safe streets. That’s one of the mayor’s new initiatives … the Safe Street initiative. Well, the same thing goes for your own community. If people don’t feel safe on their block, they’re less likely to want to introduce themselves to each other. They often come and go, to and from work, or to and from school, without interacting with each other. We’ve had historically high crime rates here in Newark, and so there’s been an atmosphere of feeling less than safe. I think that when you begin to bring people together, they begin to realize things, like for example your next door neighbors aren’t really much different than you are. They’re concerned about the same things. They’re concerned about their children’s safety. They’re concerned about drugs in the neighborhood, they’re concerned about crime rates and health.

When you can bring people together, you’re a lot more effective in organizing, and being able to accomplish things in your community rather than if you’re trying to do those types of things yourself. So the basis of our community gardening or our community beautification program is … community organizing. We help to organize communities so that they can accomplish the greater good. They may go on from a simple flower barrel planting to beginning to fight other problems and conditions that exist in their neighborhoods. We believe we’ve helped with that process by empowering them, by making them realize that, together, they’re a very powerful force, a very powerful voice.

Q. What kind of reactions do you get when people visit the Outdoor Learning Center?
Dougherty: It’s an eye-opener for everyone who visits the center. I’ve never had anyone visit and be disappointed. They are amazed. Many people drive by this site everyday along Springfield Avenue and they have no idea what’s behind the gate. And when they come in, they say ‘I just can’t believe what you’ve created!’ Everyone who visits wants to come back, and wants to participate in our programs. I don’t think people thought that they would ever see a garden in downtown Newark. And not just a garden, but a thriving garden, an educational space that so many children and residents have come to visit.

Q. Why did you choose the Central Ward location for the Greater Newark Conservancy’s home?
Dougherty: When we began looking for a site, we had criteria. Although there was a lot of vacant land in the city, that vacant land usually didn’t meet the criteria. We actually ended up in the Central Ward because of a historic structure, the former Oheb Shalom synagogue. [The three-story brick former synagogue is an example of Moorish Revival architecture and is listed on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places. – ed.] The building itself was in significant need, and still is in need of significant restoration, but it also had a lot of open space around it, which was important if we were going to create the kind of Outdoor Learning Center that we wanted, a center that we could bring tens of thousands of children to. That is our ultimate goal, bringing as many children as we can from the urban environment to this center. We wanted a space that could accommodate that. If you took a typical building lot or two in Newark, obviously you wouldn’t have that kind of space. Here we were able to build a pond, and a butterfly garden, and put a bridge over the pond, and have all different kinds of activities at the same time, in this particular location.

We’ve got the historic structure, which is the oldest in Essex County, and it’s the second oldest in the state of New Jersey, and it’s one of the oldest in the country. I think that this building is something that will draw people here who aren’t necessarily interested in gardening, per se, but may have an interest in the history of Newark. So we have a combination here of history and the environment, and many people are certainly interested in that combination.

Q. Describe the Outdoor Learning Center and its planning.
Dougherty: The parameters for building the Outdoor Learning Center were primarily educational. We looked at plants that we thought would be educational through more than one season, and would also be very urban-tolerant. This is a significant heat island here in Newark, and so you can have drought, you can have extended seasons. We wanted something that would look nice, but also be able to survive as well, and of course provide an educational component to them. We determined the areas in education –we wanted to cover and then we began to divide that up into different sections. If you actually look at the plan there are ten different learning centers within the Outdoor Learning Center. Each one of them has a different focus, each has a name, has a curriculum behind it, and so the Center itself can serve a multitude of purposes.

Our mission is to work with urban children and urban residents, and so that’s really our focus. Although we do get visitors from outside of Essex County, or the parameters of Newark, our work is primarily with the city – with cities, with urban cities and urban centers – and that’s really where we want to keep our mission. Of course, anyone’s welcome. We love visitors, we love people to come through and see what we’ve done and hopefully it can be replicated in other areas of the state, but we are primarily interested in the urban child or the urban resident.

Q. Besides the educational design, was there a philosophy behind how the Outdoor Learning Center was built?
Dougherty: The basis of our work is to educate people about what they can do for themselves. The concept behind the Outdoor Learning Center is to create an environment – whether it be man-made or natural, and in this case it’s man-made – that can be replicated all over the city of Newark. We haven’t put anything here in anyone’s backyard, in anyone’s park, or in anyone’s neighborhood. And so that’s the idea, is to create something that people realize, ‘Why can’t we have this?’ And then they can work towards that, to have a goal. It’s important not just to teach people about a subject, but also to let them know what they can do, either to take an advocacy position on it, or how they can further that work. I think we do that very well here. We show people how to take what we’ve done, bring it back to their communities, and make it successful. We’re here to help out with that, in any way we can, with technical advice and support, for example. Our small staff goes into the communities every day, and we love to do this work.

Q. What are your educational programs like outside the Learning Center?
Dougherty: We actually have two core programs that exist within some of the public schools in Newark. One of those is our Living Laboratory program. We’re an environmental and horticultural agency, and so before we had our Outdoor Learning Center our mission was to create green spaces at schools so that children could have those important hands-on science lessons. We have done that successfully in close to twenty schools in Newark. Over the years, issues have happened in terms of land use, and some of those gardens have disappeared, and new schools have been built, so the numbers change. We now work with fourteen schools regularly. The children actually go outside and engage in their hands-on lessons in their very own Living Lab, right at their school. Now that we have the Outdoor Learning Center, the idea is to bring those children here as well so that they can have another connection to what they’re doing at their school.

We also have in-class lessons. For those schools that don’t have outdoor spaces of any type -- and unfortunately that’s all too common -- we go into the classroom and do hands-on lessons with the children there. We do the best we can with what they have available. The children in those schools are a priority to bring to the Outdoor Learning Center.

All of our programs mesh with each other. We want to bring more children to the Center, but we also continue to serve just as many children in our monthly outreach lessons. So there’s a complement there – serving children in the schools, bringing children to the Center, and it’s all building upon the same lessons. We’re using the core curriculum content standards for New Jersey, and so teachers can continue to build on those standards. Our work is reinforcement. And as the children visit the Outdoor Learning Center, they experience new programs. It’s not the same program that they would have every time they’re here. You build upon it depending on the grade level, and you have different subject areas that teachers choose depending on what they’re studying. And it’s not always strictly science. Maybe it’s social studies, maybe it’s geography. Perhaps it’s language arts. And we cover all of those in the cross-curricula lessons that we offer.

People think it’s all about gardening. And it’s really not, it’s much broader than gardening. We reach out with social science, language arts, and we build literacy into all of our programs, … so it’s really not just about gardening. Gardening is just vehicle, … it’s much more than that. It’s very much cross-curriculum learning.

The most important thing that teachers tell us is that they want to come back. And that to me says it all. It’s not your typical classroom space. There’s not as much control in an outdoor center, and yet when they see the benefit of bringing their children here, that the children are excited and they can’t wait to learn, and they talk about it, and they bring it back to the classroom and continue the lessons that they’ve learned here, … the teachers always want to come back.

Q. Describe the Newark Youth Leadership Project.
Dougherty: One of my absolute favorite programs is the Newark Youth Leadership Project. We bring young high school students into our agency, teach them about the environment, and basically empower them to go out and teach others about it. They are actually going into the schools themselves and teaching their younger counterparts. Our NYLP students reached about fourteen-hundred third to fifth graders this summer in a littering campaign. They went out and talked to younger children about recycling, how not to litter, and where to put their garbage. In addition to that, they went out and did storm drain stenciling all over the city, to educate the adult residents not to throw their trash down the storm drains because it all ends up in our river.

When you see children engaged in a community issue, when you can help them become focused around an issue and they realize that they hold the key to solving the problem, that makes so much difference in their well-being, in the way they feel about themselves. At the end of the summer, these students all felt that they had contributed in a way to the city’s growth, and to the city’s environmental health. And they talk about going back to school, and if they see any of their friends littering or not taking care of the environment, they’re going to be the first ones to speak up, and I think that’s exactly what we need to do, is empower our young people.

My greatest excitement is working with the high school students. I love the little people, but the high school students are able to communicate and tell you, outright, what changes they see for themselves. And when we have things like our summer Youth leadership project and the kids can tell you, I never knew this, or I’m so excited to learn this I want to bring it back to my school, I want bring this back to my community, and we can make these changes, we can implement a recycling program in our school, we can stop people from littering and make it a beautiful city, … those are the kinds of things where you get such a great feeling. The kids, they’re always optimistic. They’re not like some of us who would turn back when we see a brick wall. These kids, they’ve embraced the brick wall. They think calling the city “the Brick city” is a great thing. Their enthusiasm and optimism is what keeps all of us going.

Q. What’s community gardening about?
Dougherty: Often we get calls from community members who have a vacant lot in their neighborhood and they want to start a community garden. We have a series of criteria that we use to determine whether it looks feasible for that garden to actually work in that space. For example, you need to have several head gardeners. You can’t just have one person in charge of the garden. You also need to have the block pretty well built up, in terms of occupation. At one point in time, many blocks in Newark were only thirty to forty percent occupied. That has changed significantly, you know, in the past few years with all the new homes that were built.

At one point in time there were about six thousand vacant lots in the city of Newark. That was probably about the maximum number that we had, and that was probably between ten and fifteen years ago. At some point, the city determined that we needed to do some new “in-fill” housing, as they began to take down some of the public housing. Our community gardens were threatened then. We had several instances where people were utilizing community garden spaces, and had put in thousands of hours of sweat equity into the project, with building the raised beds and putting up fences, and worked through hours and hours of beautification activities, only to have that lot auctioned off to a private developer.

A lot of our community gardeners have been with us for a very long time. What ends up happening is their children and their grandchildren get involved, and the next thing you know the community garden becomes sort of a social place for people to meet. Especially in the warm weather. You’ll often times go there and people will be having a picnic or barbeque, or the block association will be having a party, and it will be revolving around the community garden. People share their produce. We had a program one summer where some of our community gardeners were donating food to the food bank, excess produce that they grew. People are very engaged in their communities. There are so many people in this city who care about the city and about the other residents of the city, and about the city’s future, that they’re very interested in working together on programs such as community gardens, which they know help to build and strengthen their own blocks and their own communities.

Q. Can the community garden program continue to thrive?
Dougherty: We began to work with the city in terms of redefining their community gardening policy. We’ve taken some significant strides in that area, but there are still many challenges. We’re trying to get the current administration to make some changes to City policy regarding community gardens. Often times, the process of adopting a community garden is so onerous that residents give up. It requires everyone who is going to be on that garden site to go down to City Hall and sign the lease. And that means if there are thirty families involved, someone from each of the thirty families must go to City Hall and sign the lease. The current lease does not allow children on the site. And so there are a lot of obstacles that get in the way of developing community gardens. We try to facilitate that. We try to work with the city to make it an easier process.

Q. Describe the Greater Newark Conservancy’s City gardens Contest.
Dougherty: The contest really starts in February when people come to our seed starting workshop and decide that they want to engage in the contest in the growing season. People can sign up to have their garden judged as part of our city wides contest, and we have a couple of judgings that take place over the summer. The judges are all volunteers. We have everything from the novice to the experienced going out to judge the gardens. We like to think that there’s a category for everyone. We have categories like “Best Block.” We allow home gardens to enter, and community gardens. We support art in the garden. There’s really something for everyone. We give away fabulous prizes and you’d think we were the “Price is Right,” because people are very excited about the contest. Can’t wait to get their applications in. Call, start calling weeks before the contest to see who won. It’s really exciting. I wish that more people could come and actually see the level of participation by the community and how excited people get to win.

The contestants get excited often because no one else gets to see their garden, they’ve worked so very hard on it, and only a few judges will come to the site. This is a city, and so people’s spaces are very unique. For instance, we have a young man who has a garden on a rooftop. So in order to judge his garden you have to climb up several flights of stairs and go out onto the roof. We have another contestant where you have to actually walk through their living room to get to the backyard garden. We find that many of these are sort of “secret gardens” of Newark. If you were driving past on the street, you’d never know that there’s this beautiful, lush space in the back of someone’s home. You may have to crawl through an alley to get to a garden. But people are very anxious to show them off, and when the judges come they often put out tea and cookies, or they’re dressed in their finest outfit to entertain and host the judges that are coming. People are very creative in how they are able to stack their gardens and make the maximum use of a ten by ten space!

Q. People in Newark often mention the very negative attitudes toward their city. How have you worked against that?
Dougherty: Well, we have had our skeptics across the years. I often run into people who say, Oh, people in Newark don’t care how their houses look. They really don’t care about the city. And I would say to any of those people that they should come and be a part of the City Gardens contest. They should see the excitement and they should see people getting prepared to host the judges before the contest. They should come and see themselves, rather than read the newspaper and get what the public perception is of the city of Newark.

What I see from the residents is, they want to share the knowledge. It’s not something they want to keep to themselves. They want to tell their neighbors how to go about making their home more beautiful. And so it’s something that can spread. It’s a fever, kind of thing; gardening gets in your blood, and it gets ingrained in you, and you want to share that activity. You know how it makes you feel inside when you plant something and you watch it grow and it becomes beautiful. You want to share that knowledge, and that peacefulness that you gained from gardening with others. I see people willing to share, and they want to bring their friends, and they want to tell the people on the next block that they should get involved in these activities.

Q. Why is gardening so compelling for some people?
Dougherty: You have to realize that in Newark we have a culture of people that have grown up with gardening. Many older people who live in Newark now lived on farms when they grew up, or their cousins or uncles or aunts lived on farms, and gardening is something that’s ingrained in them. They realize the potential that you can achieve when you just engage in a small gardening project. I do believe that people in Newark are very proud of their city. Most of our gardeners have been here for a very long time. They’ve survived the ups and downs of Newark. And I think everybody knows what we mean by that. But they’re here, … and they’re staying here. And so they see gardening as an opportunity to show how Newark can be a better place. Yes, we do have our skeptics, but you need to look beyond the cracks in the sidewalk to see what’s really in the city and what the people are made of. And the people here are very strong, and very interested in building their communities, and changing that entire perception of Newark being a negative city. There are great things happening here.

Q. “Urban greening” in Newark has a longer history, doesn’t it?
Dougherty: Essex County Park system is the oldest park system in the country. So people cared very much about the creation and maintenance of open space. They created some jewels in our park system in Essex County. Unfortunately, with the changing times people got a little bit away from public parks and began to focus more on other aspects of the city: the downtown districts, the commercial areas, and got away from the quality of life issues for residents. I think there’s a big swing back towards the recognition that if you want to have a successful, beautiful, livable, workable city, you need open space for people. You need parks in communities. You need to have access to walk to a park, or at least a short train ride, to a park. The Essex County park system is phenomenal, but not everyone has access to that. It’s very far away for some people, and in the city of Newark only about fifty percent of the residents actually have cars. So if you don’t have a car, you don’t have access to a park.

The livable workable city very much includes open space, very much includes public parks, vest pocket parks, and community gardens. We’re also working on an extensive waterfront plan to revitalize the waterfront area, so that the public has access to that. We want to build the city’s residency back up. A lot of people left the city in the mid-nineteen-hundreds, and there’s an emphasis toward bringing more families back to Newark. And you need to have these certain quality of life indicators such as your open space; you need to have trees, you need to have other things as well … other amenities are as important, of course. But open space is something that we hear from all the residents that they’re interested in. People who are interested in moving back into the city are very concerned about where’s the local park? How can I recreate? How can my children play soccer?, or whatever other recreational opportunity they’re engaged in.

Q. How does Newark currently stack up against other American cities in terms of its open space?
Dougherty: There’s not really such a thing as a national average when it comes to open spaces needs, however, cities of similar size to Newark have probably three to four times more open space than Newark does. On average Newark has about two acres for every thousand residents. That’s much different in the Ironbound section of Newark, where they only have a half an acre for every one thousand residents. So other cities of comparative size have about seven to eight acres per thousand people, so we are a little bit behind what we should be. Recently there have been some mindset changes in city administration in moving more towards the positive end of that rather than the negative end.

One of the things that the Conservancy has been focusing on with the city administration is making certain that everyone has a park within a reasonable distance from their home. Branch Brook is wonderful; Weequahic Park is another fantastic park; West Side is undergoing significant renovations; however, those have neighborhoods associated with them, people who can regularly walk to them. They also have places where people could park if they were to drive to them. But that eliminates about half of the city, especially as you get to the downtown area, and you get over into the Ironbound, where’s there’s much less parkland associated with those neighborhoods. So, we need to focus on the smaller park areas. Obviously recreation has to take place in the larger spaces, but for people to just be able to sit under a tree and read a book, or just engage in some of the soulfulness that comes with sitting in green space, … people need to have access to that on a regular basis, not just every other Sunday or on an occasion. They need to regularly be able to have access to open space and green space in the city of Newark.

Q. What happened to that earlier commitment to green space in Newark?
Dougherty: I think cities in general began to get more focused on just survival. When you start to look at the fact that we had the urban flight, that people were leaving cities in droves. The city of Newark’s population was cut in half. So they weren’t really thinking about creating any new amenities; they were focusing on how to keep people here. And focusing on things like jobs, rather than parks and open space. Now that we see that the population has become stable and is beginning to actually slightly increase, you can then talk about those neighborhood amenities. Before that it was more managing crisis than proper planning.

For example, zoning hasn’t been changed since the 1950’s. Zoning’s what really drives your land use planning, and our zoning requirements have not been updated since the 1950’s! Our Master Plan is significantly out of date. The last full Master Plan we did was in 1990, so Newark is out of date in sort of the planning element of it. The new administration is focused on planning, and so we’re getting up to speed on our housing element of the master plan, and the open space element.

And the community is getting involved in it. The residents really know their communities better than anyone else. They need to be engaged in telling you, a park will work here, or this is where we need a community center, or this is the best place for a school. They live there. They know how things work. The Conservancy has been driving that point home for the past ten years.

Q. Why the “Greater” in your organizational title?
Dougherty: We call ourselves “Greater” Newark Conservancy because our mission is to really work with urban populations. And Newark is not an island; it has many cities that surround it. And the same opportunities that we provide for Newark residents and children, we want to provide for urban residents, say, in Irvington, or Bloomfield, and Jersey City. Those are also underserved populations in the same program areas that we promote. Our services are very heavily used here in Newark; we are reaching out to other communities, now that we have our beautiful Outdoor Learning Center.

Q. Describe some of the other challenges that impact the Conservancy’s mission.
Dougherty: Planning and land use. The land use issue is a bigger problem than it used to be. When we had six thousand vacant lots, there wasn’t a problem. There was plenty of land to go around. But now that we have, maybe a thousand vacant lots, … I’m not sure what the exact number is …there’s a significant pressure. The average school in Newark is about eighty years old. We’ve got new schools that need to be built. Those cannot be built on just a lot – you need about an acre, and minimum an acre. We have needs in terms of public housing; we tore down a lot of the public housing that existed here in Newark, so we have a pressure on the city to create new housing. Obviously that can come into conflict with open space needs. But a livable workable community – one that’s sustainable -- is something that we’ve talked about with the new administration. We need to create a sustainable Newark, which is a good balance between housing and open space, recreation, … all the amenities that we all take for granted, … they need to exist here in Newark to have a healthy, sustainable community.

Q. Despite bad news now and then, you still see positive impacts and positive changes?
Dougherty: The renewed excitement and the renewed sense of hope that we have here in Newark, that I see from the residents everyday, … it happens when you work with the community. And that’s in spite of, I should say, all the obstacles over the past years, over the past decades, with the schools, with the riots, the ups and downs of Newark. People have stayed here. There’s a love of Newark, for example, when you speak to people who live here now, or that used to live here, and they talk about how it was to be in Newark, … I think that’s what keeps you going. It’s that renewed sense of hope and optimism. I’m the eternal optimist, I think you can do anything if you work together and you work hard enough, and you try at it, and you just don’t give up. We built our Outdoor Learning Center; people said we couldn’t do it. There were amazing obstacles that we had to overcome to actually build it, and we persevered, and I think that people of Newark have persevered, over the years, in spite of all of their obstacles and now it’s a brighter day. And I think there’s nothing that we can’t do together.