Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.

To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.

You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do.

I have no interest in arguing with haters, and also, I really don't want to be associated, you know, with a group of people who are only pushing to fight against something and not for something. I do want to be known as different. Period. And I believe in the self-determination of all people and if that's the way people want to define themselves, so be it.

We want to bring enterprise back to blighted urban areas. People there have been told nothing is ever going to change. The policy makers may feel the same way.

It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.