09/01/2026
Some rooms are hard to get into. That doesn’t mean our Operators shouldn’t be in them.
This summer, EcoPower ’26 took a trip to NJIT in Newark for “New Jersey: Making Places from Forgotten Spaces”
— a full day with planners, environmental practitioners, and community builders asking one question: what do we do with the spaces people have left behind?
Look around that room and you would not usually see teenagers or young adults. That was the point.
Because when one of our operators, Adiba, asked “what it looks like to recycle a place?”, when Krissa said “it’s interesting that vacant lots are viewed with historical context instead of just an inconvenience”, when Jayden (who was unable to be physically present but learned from his cohort) connected the whole conversation to his own side project about community space in Canarsie and Flatlands — those weren’t small moments. Those were the exact voices that belong in those rooms.
Biggest takeaway: The people who grow up in a neighborhood should have a say in what gets built there. Period.
We are grateful to NJIT TAB NJIT Center for Community Systems | NJIT TAB for opening that door. For letting our Operators sit with powerful speakers, see who exactly is making these decisions, and learn the real process behind placemaking, brownfields, and what it looks like when a city actually gets it right.
Newark showed them it’s possible. The Flats is next.
ForgottenNoMore EnvironmentalJustice BrooklynYouth YouthLeadership CommunityPower Brownfields UrbanPlanning ClimateJustice NextGeneration BlackYouthMatter TheFlatsBuilds NJITTab CivicPower YouthInternship EcoPower
