January 9, 2003 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Anthony Thomas, a high-school sophomore, spends almost every afternoon and weekend working as an environmental
activist in his blighted neighborhood in New York’s South Bronx. He is one of an estimated 50,000 teenagers — a majority of whom live below the poverty line — who are crammed into a square-mile tract of land, home to one of the city’s largest public-housing projects.
Anthony recognizes that some may wonder about his role as urban environmentalist. Sometimes his neighbors question his priorities. What about jobs, they ask, or low-cost housing?
Because he has been an activist since he was 10, he can confidently sum up why the environmental degradation in his neighborhood warrants everyone’s attention. “We have one of the highest rates of asthma in the country,” he says. “Just because we do not have as much money as other communities, we still deserve the same resources. We need green space. Kids in this neighborhood get hit by trucks while they play in the streets because we don’t have safe parks.”
Mr. Thomas was born and raised in the neighborhood called Bronx River, named after the waterway it borders. Now 16, he has been a member of a local Christian activist group called Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice for six years, and as part of his work, he helped the National Guard rescue 44 cars that had been dumped in the Bronx River and were leaking toxic chemicals. The group’s headquarters are three blocks from his apartment, in the basement of the St. Joan of Arc church.
In a move many local observers credit to the work of what Youth Ministries calls its “River Team” activism, the city allocated $11-million to its Parks Department to clean up the river and the contiguous Starlight Park. If Mr. Thomas and his colleagues get their way, the Parks workers, with their special equipment for handling toxic sludge, will come back to tackle more clean-up projects.
The endeavors of Mr. Thomas and his 30 fellow teenage activists have mobilized the neighborhood. Local politicians, such as state legislator Rubin Diaz Jr., greet the youthful organizers by name on the street. “I tip my hat to them,” the politician says. “Almost single-handedly, they have raised consciousness about the Bronx River to a high level.”
Climbing the “Wrong Wall”
Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice was founded in 1994 by Alexie Torres-Fleming, a former youth group leader at another local parish. She grew up in the local Bronx River Housing Project and says that when she was a teenager, she attended youth-development programs that emphasized how to “get out of the ghetto, be a credit to your race, and enter corporate America.”
She did just that, working for Chase Manhattan bank during her 20s, before she decided she was “climbing the ladder, but climbing it up the wrong wall.”
Ms. Torres-Fleming was drawn back to her old neighborhood, and by the time she came up with the idea for Youth Ministries, she vowed that the group would not be dedicated to encouraging youngsters to hightail it out of the South Bronx. Instead, Ms. Torres-Fleming hoped that her charity would motivate the local teenagers — who come from a neighborhood that is 65 percent Hispanic, 30 percent black, and the rest a mix of white and Asian — to improve their surroundings.
Youth Ministries does not just focus on environmental activism. River Team is its longest-lasting project, but the group has branched out recently.
A separate group of teenage activists hopes to foster better relations between the police and the local residents. The South Bronx attracted national attention when the police killed an unarmed civilian, Amadou Diallo, in 1999.
Second Generation
Anthony Thomas, one of three de facto leaders of River Team, along with Jennifer Reyes and Divad Durant, represents the second generation of teenage activists. (The group has no formal titles, but the three teenagers have been around the longest.)
Jennifer, who lives across the street in the public-housing development, is a high-school sophomore who plans to go to college after she graduates, but does not know what she will study. She is sure only that she wants to stick around the neighborhood to enjoy the fruits of her activism.
Divad Durant attends a performing-arts high school in Manhattan, and he considers his fellow activists to be his closest friends. He and Anthony have even talked about going into business together someday — perhaps to start a record label or enter another aspect of the music business.
The three took over after the group’s first leaders graduated from high school. Anthony’s cousin, David Shuffler, recruited Anthony originally when Mr. Shuffler was one of its first members. Now at age 23, Mr. Shuffler works full time with the 200-member group.
River Team activists have systematically tried to undo years of industrialization and neglect. After they successfully lobbied the city to clean up the local Starlight Park, which had become unusable because of accumulated trash and sludge from illegal dumping, they focused on the Bronx River, which runs north to south through their part of the borough. Like many other urban waterways, the Bronx River suffered from dangerous levels of pollution, and local wildlife was scarce.
According to Assemblyman Diaz, the Bronx River until recently was widely known around New York as the best place to ditch a car for the insurance money. Years of other kinds of dumping along the river have also taken their toll, and often, the River Team teenagers will roll up their own sleeves on the weekends and organize a community cleanup.
John Calvelli, senior vice president of public affairs at the Wildlife Conservation Society, says that the river has not been this clean in more than 100 years. “Life has come back to the river,” he observes.
The society runs the Bronx Zoo, which lies along a two-mile stretch of the river upstream from the Bronx River neighborhood. It received a grant for $8-million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create a greenbelt along the river. The society plans to give $250,000 of that grant to Youth Ministries to help the group continue its activism and cleanup efforts.
The federal money came at the urging of U.S. Rep. José E. Serrano, a Democrat who, Mr. Calvelli says, was reacting to the ground-swell of support in his district. That support, says Mr. Calvelli, can be attributed directly to the River Team’s work.
Representative Serrano’s interest in the group reflects a pattern in the neighborhood: The teenagers have a talent for getting people’s attention. They even lead canoe tours on the river for people who might otherwise never set foot in their checkered area of the city.
Anthony Thomas regularly paddles government officials and other local celebrities up and down the river. One tour included Governor George Pataki.
Ms. Torres-Fleming believes that the trip influenced a recent decision to direct the state Department of Transportation to devote $11-million to building pedestrian walkways over the river and to cleaning up the riverbank.
Anthony says he hopes that the tour-guide work has made him a better public speaker.
It has also given him something to look forward to every day. Anthony and his colleagues say Youth Ministries provides teenagers with their richest source of inspiration. It also helps them cultivate friendships with young people from their neighborhood, who do not all attend the same schools.
Not Alway Victorious
Though Youth Ministries has been largely successful, it has also suffered the occasional defeat.
The group has been trying to shut down the Sheridan Expressway, a short highway that cuts through the Bronx River neighborhood on the way to virtually nowhere. Members of the group say that few vehicles use the road, except early in the morning when trucks use the expressway to deliver fruit and vegetables to a wholesale food market that serves many of the groceries and restaurants in Manhattan.
Even though the roadway is lightly used, the teenagers say that the morning traffic alone creates exhaust fumes that pour into their densely populated neighborhood. More than a dozen teen-agers once staged a sit-down in the middle of the highway at rush hour, and invited a local newspaper to take photos, to demonstrate that the expressway is rarely used.
However, the state Department of Transportation has not agreed to decommission the road and is instead trying to find ways to link it to more well-trafficked thoroughfares.
The teenagers lost that battle, but are not easily frustrated.
“Closing a highway is a tough sell,” says Anthony.
He and the rest of the River Team will closely monitor the state’s plans. The Sheridan Expressway project, along with the gradual renovations of the park, and the still-polluted river, will continue to occupy the group in the years to come.
Most recently, the group has begun to focus on getting an abandoned cement plant, an eyesore that once sheltered illegal squatters, turned into more green space.
Foundation Support
Grant makers have so far been supportive of Youth Ministries. The Surdna Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hazen Foundation, and the New York Foundation, among others, have made grants to the organization, which has a $1-million budget.
Supporters of groups like Youth Ministries say such organizations give youngsters an opportunity to gain key skills, make friends, and otherwise avoid negative peer pressure. And as a bonus, the organizing itself can lead to important policy changes that benefit the entire neighborhood, says Taj James, executive director of the California Fund for Youth Organizing, which supports groups similar to Youth Ministries on the West Coast.
Anthony Thomas says his work with Youth Ministries often puts him in the limelight.
“I do talk to funders a lot,” he says. “I give presentations a lot. I’ve been on the radio. I haven’t done TV yet, but I’m waiting.”
He likes the attention, but is also humbled by it.
“When we first started, we didn’t have any money,” he recalls. Even though the group now has more resources and attracts volunteers easily, he says he and his colleagues continue to feel that their participation is important. “We still keep doing it because we love it.”
