“We want to set up a network of air quality sensors around the city and map out the air quality—particularly in the Bronx—and help students become scientifically literate activists in their communities,” said Stephen Holler, Ph.D., chair and associate professor of Fordham’s physics and engineering physics department, who is co-leading the project with Usha Sankar, Ph.D., an advanced lecturer in biological sciences. “Through our project, we can start a dialogue about climate change and say, ‘Let’s do something to fix it together.’”

Air pollution triggers many respiratory illnesses. One in 13 Americans have asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Among the five New York City boroughs, the Bronx has the highest percentage of asthma diagnoses for children up to age 12, as well as the highest child asthma hospitalization rates. 

The goal of Project FRESH Air (Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Healthy Air) is to combat those statistics with education. 

Holler has started setting up a network of PurpleAir air quality sensors in middle and high schools in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, including Jonas Bronck Academy, All Hallows High School, and Cristo Rey New York High School. Each sensor—not just the project sensors in the city, but independent Purple Air sensors worldwide—records data 24/7. The data is viewable on an interactive map in real time. 

The project garners interest because air quality is an issue people can relate to, Holler said. 

“I don’t think that many people in the Bronx are interested in the fact that it’s going to be one or two degrees warmer in a few decades. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and worried about your kids, that’s not your high priority, right? So we’re tackling this issue by looking at it through an air quality perspective,” said Holler, who has previously worked with local students on climate change projects. “Air quality will degrade as the climate changes. We’ll have more pollution and particulate matter in the air from combustion sources, vehicles, and the urban environment, which irritate the lungs and aggravate asthma. But this is an immediate problem that we can address.” 

The FRESH Air team, which includes Fordham faculty, undergraduates, and middle and high school educators, is now working on ways to incorporate the sensors and their data into middle and high school curricula. Students will be able to build their own handheld sensors with special kits. They will also be tasked with plotting air quality data from their sensors and searching for trends. 

“They can plot the data in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and correlate it with factors like weather. Was the air quality better on this day or another? Was there a holiday? And they can start to understand the dynamics and patterns that are happening in their community,” Holler said.

This fall through a virtual webinar, the FRESH Air team introduced the project to students and families at Jonas Bronck Academy, located one block away from the Rose Hill campus. 

“The day after the informational session, our students were asking questions to all five of us teachers,” said Alexiander Soler, a seventh grade science teacher at JBA. “‘What is air quality? How does that relate to us? How does it connect to asthma?’”

Next spring, JBA will integrate Project FRESH Air into its sixth, seventh, and eighth grade curricula. The sixth graders will learn about air pollution and how it’s measured, the seventh graders will learn about health implications affected by air quality, and the eighth graders will learn how technology improves data collection, while using the sensors and their data, said Soler. Fordham undergraduates will also work with students on a weekly basis to help them analyze their data, said Holler. About 260 students at JBA will benefit from this curriculum, said Soler.

“These sensors are effectively going to be permanent installations,” Holler said. “Over the next two to three years, we are looking to have about 25 schools on this project.” 

The project originally emerged from the Higher Education Incubator and Think Tank led by Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and associate vice president for arts and sciences, and Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and special adviser to the provost, before the pandemic. It is being largely funded by James C. McGroddy, a former senior vice president and director of research at IBM who wants to promote STEM education, especially for minority and underserved populations. 

“The purpose of science is to gain an understanding of the natural world and its impact on our lives. This project will create a real scenario that our students can identify with, and hopefully increase their interest in science and becoming problem-solvers,” said Soler. “It will allow our students to see how science truly affects their lives.”  

“We’re working on having our students understand that what goes on outside is community. It’s love. It’s history,” said Lisa Preti, an assistant director in student financial services at Fordham and the mural project manager. “We’re having people actually immerse themselves in the community, as opposed to just learning about it in the classroom.”

The initiative was spearheaded by Fordham Bronx Advocates, a grassroots group of 10 to 15 Fordham community members and Bronx residents whose goal is to create a stronger partnership between Fordham and its neighbors. The mural is the first major project for the group, which was founded by Preti and her colleague Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African and African American studies, this past fall semester. The large scale artwork is being painted on a side wall of the John E. Grimm III Clubhouse, a center that offers academic and recreational activities for young people in the community, said Preti. 

“The first building I saw right across the street from Fordham was the clubhouse on 189th Street and Lorillard Place. I went in and asked them if they were interested in creating a mural on site, and they said, ‘Yes, absolutely—we’ve been looking to do something like that for a long time,’” said Preti. “It’s really just taken off from there.” 

The mural was designed by Lovie Pignata, a Bronx artist and community activist, and funded by several Fordham groups and departments including the Bronx African American History Project, the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Fordham College Dean’s Office, and the Center for Community Engaged Learning. Project organizers also received free paint, rollers, and supplies from the nearby New Palace Paint & Home Center on 180th Street, said Preti. 

“It was amazing to see the community so quickly say, yes, we’ll help,” said Preti, a Bronx native whose parents still reside in the borough. “It started as a small grassroots movement, and we got lucky along the way.”

In mid-April, the artist behind the mural, Pignata, met with Fordham student volunteers and the clubhouse’s teenagers and staff to transform a plain brick wall into a garden mural bursting with colorful fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The mural includes several symbols, including root vegetables, which represent hidden potential, said Pignata.

After the mural is completed in May, the clubhouse will plant an actual community garden in front of the mural to help combat local food insecurity. Three planter boxes have been donated by the Northeast Bronx Community Farmers Market Project, which will also provide seedlings, said Pignata. 

“The theme of the mural is ‘growing together,’” Pignata said. “I like to make what I call community art, which is more hands-on and has more interaction with the people who will live near it [than public art]. I hope everybody involved in the mural is proud of it and feels like they’re a part of it.” 

Isabella Iazzetta, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who has participated in two painting sessions, said her volunteer experience has introduced her to more members of the Bronx community, including elementary school students who walk by and marvel at the mural. This summer, Iazzetta will be able to walk past the finished mural every day. 

“My roommates and I are actually moving off campus on that same block,” said Iazzetta, who studies humanitarian studies and theology religious studies at Fordham. “It’ll be so cool to look at and know that I had a tiny role in helping this all come to life.”

Gafney arrived at Fordham two years ago as the center’s director of administration and academic development after several years in higher education as an instructor, administrator, and independent consultant. She started during a time of restructuring within the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, which included launching the center to bring together established community outreach programs alongside service learning curricula.

Gafney will now oversee marquee programs like Urban Plunge, the pre-orientation program that introduces first-year students to the city through service, and Global Outreach, which partners with community-based organizations at home and abroad to help students better understand social justice issues at the ground level. On the academic side of the house, Gafney will continue to build on her work with faculty to facilitate curricular offerings that include engagement with the community.

“My background it the humanities and the liberal arts laid out a path where I fell in love with teaching, but then I began to look at more systemic ways to create policies that put relationships with people first, which is essential in education,” she said.

A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, Gafney earned her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Mentoring and teaching students at Hunter College and John Jay College sparked an interest in student success.

“I began asking questions about what gets students into college, how they persist, and what they need to complete college on time,” she said.

She later consulted for colleges and universities throughout New York state to develop and evaluate STEM programs with the ultimate goal of recruiting students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Having fostered an interest in the nut-and-bolts of higher education, she arrived at Fordham tasked with growing the University’s community-engaged approach to coursework, she said.

“A community engaged class takes up a social justice concern or problem or topic and applies it to that class through community engagement,” she said.  “It could be an organic chemistry class that deconstructs an environmental justice issue or a sociology class that examines redlining.”

Gafney said that while there was a strong tradition of service learning at Fordham when she arrived, the Center for Community Engaged Learning offers many more opportunities for students to get involved in community-based work through their undergraduate courses. Today, community engaged learning classes to ask each student to take on a direct service or project-based experience, along with two written assignments and a thoughtful reflective practice, such as journaling or a set of in-class discussions that unpack their experience.

These courses have increased in number dramatically as well. In the 2014-2015 school year there were seven service learning courses offered; this school year there were 52 community engaged courses supported by the center. Gafney credited several faculty members–whom she referred to as “expert practitioners”– with helping lay the groundwork for what is now a wide array of course offerings across disciplines.

CCEL provides support to faculty by connecting them with appropriate community based organizations that have an established relationship with Fordham. Gafney also facilitates faculty workgroups that meet eight times a semester to workshop course proposals. The group delves into the pedagogy of teaching a community-based course, she said, and “interrogates systems of racism” while discussing how to hold those difficult conversations in a classroom. The fact that she is a white woman facilitating conversations on race has not been lost on her.

“I am approaching a lot of this work as a student and learning from my staff, other leaders in the field, and from our partners,” she said. “I see this learning and developing myself as iterative, under construction, and something that I must return to every day.”

On her nightstand at the moment are books by Ibram Kendi, Michelle Alexander, and Bryan Washington, she said.

“I’m deeply committed to anti-racism in everything I do,” she said, after crediting several colleagues from across the University who she said have helped her deepen her understanding of racism. She added that the pandemic and recent Black Lives Matter protests have underscored inequities that CCEL has sought to address in its programming.

“Even more than in ordinary times, we really see the importance of community-based solutions,” she said. “We’ll be looking to our partners to see how they’re approaching this political, cultural, and social change, as well as a rising awareness around injustice and human rights violations in this country.”

Gafney said that the post-pandemic world could offer society an opportunity to realign its principles. She drew parallels to her research on 14th-century secular writing in England, France, and Italy to what that world might look like. She noted that in years after the plague,  writers often employed the motif of the Garden of Eden as a stand-in for a newly constructed society.

“It was a way to think about how to construct a new society after the destruction of an urban society,” she said. “Then as now I hope for a restructuring of problematic hierarchies, like who has power and how it is used. Because in these moments of flux that we don’t wish for, that is when we can re-valuate what is possible.”

Get ready to live it up in the Boogie Down.

It’s the Bronx, a festival that celebrates art, music, food, and hustle which the city’s northernmost borough is famous for, will kick off on March 23rd at the Andrew Freedman Home. The all-day event will begin with panel discussions with Bronx influencers, including Saraciea Fennell, the founder of #TheBronxisReading, and will culminate with a night of music and performances by over two dozen artists. The festival will continue once a month from May through October.

The preview event for It’s the Bronx on Jan. 26 at the Bronx Brewery attracted hundreds of Bronx creatives, entrepreneurs, art supporters, and food and beer lovers.

“It was an amazing and overwhelming experience to perform there. To be surrounded by so many talented people from the Bronx—it felt like home,” says singer-songwriter Mati, one of the festival’s headliners.

Mati has been performing since she was 12. Her music is a combination of rhythm and blues and Bengali Lalon Geeti. “I perform in the Bronx every chance that I can get. The crowd’s energy is different from Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

“This event is all about the “come-up,” says Marco Shalma, the founder of It’s the Bronx. “We want to get local creatives in front of larger audiences, engage with them to the highest industry standards, and put them in contact with decision-makers.“

The festival will feature the Bronx’s most notable “hustlers,” like Jessica Cunnington from News12, Amaurys Grullon of Bronx Native, Dandy In the Bronx and more. The main sponsor, the Bronx Brewery, will serve local craft beer. Jibarito Shack, Empanology, No Carne, and the Uptown Vegan will dish up local cuisine.

Also featured in the day’s lineup are a DJ turntable battle and a fine art gallery exhibition showcasing the work of local Bronx photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, and painters.

Shalma and his team have donated their after-work hours in order to bring this event to the community.  “Any profits for the event will be allocated toward a stipend for the team, a donation to the Andrew Freedman Home and the Bronx Creative Alliance, a non-for-profit we have been working to put together, to give the creatives in the community legal, financial, and admin support.”

This festival is just the start, says Shalma, who was one of the co-founders behind the Bronx Night Market. “The team and I like to dream big, wanting to get the entire city behind the idea of supporting up-and-comers. In three to four years? A qualifier event in each borough leading to a citywide weekend celebrating hustle.”

“There’s been a fascination in the Middle Ages that goes back a really, really long way. And why is that? Well, this is a really great canvas on which people project their dreams, their fantasies, a different world that they wished they could inhabit,” said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., director of medieval studies.

“At Fordham we know, we recognize, that we’re really the home for medieval studies. And we realize that that’s not something that most people would know .., that there was a great place to study the Middle Ages in New York City. So …  we thought, what better place to do that than at a medieval festival?”

What she does: She is working to boost student retention, provide students with meaningful academic counseling, and help them feel like Fordham is home.

How long at Fordham: Eleven years (A month and a half as assistant dean)

She remembers the lilt of bachata and salsa songs in the streets, the hydrants spouting water in the summertime, the graffiti that felt more like art than vandalism. She spent her childhood in the Bronx—a place that, after many years, still feels like home. And it was there, in the Bronx, that she found Fordham.

“I would drive by campus and see campus as a kid, but I didn’t know what it was,” said Christie-Belle Garcia, the new assistant dean for student support and success at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “And then years later, I came to Fordham. It was kind of foreshadowing, right?”

Garcia grew up in the Bedford Park neighborhood—a nine-minute walk from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. She was raised by her mother, a NewYork-Presbyterian nutritionist, and her father, a sales representative in the milk industry. Garcia’s parents immigrated to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic in the ’70s. Her father, she said, showed her the value of networking and making meaningful connections with strangers.

“I learned that really early,” said Garcia. “That people matter. Relationships matter. And that everyone’s connected in some way, shape, or form.”

She decided to become a teacher. But as an education graduate student at Manhattanville College, Garcia didn’t take on a traditional teaching position. She started working as a counselor with the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP) , a statewide program that helps underrepresented or economically disadvantaged students succeed in the STEM fields. Instead of following a standard curriculum in a classroom, she was doing something different: listening to her students’ ambitions, discussing their challenges, and working with them on an individual basis.

“That, I think, just changed the trajectory of my life,” Garcia said. “I started realizing that all of the things that really mattered to me—creating opportunities for students, supporting student success, coaching students through how to make things happen for them—I could do more in that role than I could in a classroom.”

In 2007, Garcia began her first day at Fordham as a CSTEP counselor. Within a few months, she worked her way up to assistant director for STEP, the junior high and high school version of CSTEP, and later the assistant director of CSTEP. In those eighteen years, she’s done a lot: counseled hundreds of students, supervised counseling staff, and organized events and workshops.

“I tell students, ‘Sometimes I’m a cheerleader, and sometimes I’m a coach. There’s moments where we’re celebrating your successes, and we’re cheering you on in the middle of difficult situations,’” said Garcia. “‘And in other moments, I’m coaching you so that you know what decision to make next, and how to go about doing that.’”

And now, as of late July, she’s doing the same thing on a much larger scale—as assistant dean for student support and success at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Her responsibilities include assisting students on academic probation, promoting an emerging online platform that will help advisers detect student issues and tackle them sooner than later, and boosting student retention rates. It comes down to one thing:

“How do we identify the things that help students feel like they belong here?” she said. “And how do we make that a reality for them?”

In the meantime, Garcia is working on her Ph.D. at Fordham’s Graduate School of Education. She’s researching racial microaggressions and how they impact underrepresented students in the STEM field—a topic whose roots began with CSTEP. And speaking of roots, she is the first in her family to have a master’s degree and, soon enough, a Ph.D.

“Working in the Bronx for the last eleven years has been a full-circle experience,” Garcia said. “Contributing to this community, and to education in this community…I very much enjoy it.” 

Director of Community Engagement and Partnerships at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS)

TIME AT FORDHAM

Two and a half years.

WHAT SHE DOES

“A school of social work, by definition, is very connected to the community. I try to amplify the role and visibility of the school in the community of New York City and the region.”

BACKGROUND

Fordham is Wackstein’s first academic role following a long career in city government and at nonprofit organizations. She worked in homeless services in Mayor David Dinkins’ administration. For the past 25 years she served as an executive director, first at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, and then at a federation of 38 settlement houses and community centers called United Neighborhood Houses. She recently helped facilitate tours for Fordham students of settlement houses here in New York and London.

CONNECTING THE CONNECTIONS

She helps form connections with government and nonprofit organizations beyond the established relationships the school already has because of student field placements. (Students at GSS are required to complete 1200 hours of fieldwork at government and nonprofit agencies).

She recently arranged a partnership with Goddard Riverside Community Center, which will work with Fordham researchers to survey residents of nearby Amsterdam Houses, the public housing developments behind Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. Funding for the project will come from New York Community Trust, the city’s nonprofit community foundation. She also designed the selection process for a new scholarship provided by Catholic Charities for staff from that organization to get their M.S.W. at GSS. Similarly, she’s been working with New York Foundling to help identify GSS social work students with interests in child welfare that could be eligible for scholarships from that organization.

FROM PROTEST TO ENGAGEMENT  

“We had a lot of teachers in my family, but I think coming of age in the late 60s, early 70s, with all the protests and activism, I became aware of the world of social justice. What gives me hope today is that with all the current protests, we’re seeing an uptick in people’s interest in action and social justice.”

NAVIGATING NONPROFITS  

“When I was running Lenox Hill, the settlement house, I always felt like I had to be like an interpreter or a chameleon. We had a wealthy board of directors from the Upper East Side—people who were very generous to our organization; they spoke one language. When speaking to my staff of social workers and teachers, that was another language. Then we had to communicate with our clients who were homeless people, older adults, and kids. We treated them with the same dignity and respect as Mrs. Park Avenue—who had dignity too, just in a different way.”

ADVICE FOR SOCIAL WORKERS

“I tell the students here at the School of Social Services, ‘Your job, whether you are a clinical social worker, whether you’re an administrator, or whether you’re a policy person, is to manage different constituencies.’ My work here is the same. You deal with faculty. You deal with administrators. You deal with students. These are different stakeholder groups. It’s the same. You just have to be your authentic self and treat everyone with equal dignity.”

The all-day literary event, organized by book publicist and South Bronx native Saraciea Fennell, brought writers, illustrators, and industry professionals to the community, as well as a vendor to sell books on site. (Learn more about Fennell’s inspiration for this festival in this interview at Shondaland.)

Fordham stepped in as a last-minute cosponsor of the Bronx Book Festival, thanks to alumnus Miles Doyle, FCRH ’01, a senior editor at HarperOne, and Rafael Zapata, special adviser to the president for diversity, chief diversity officer, and associate vice president for Academic Affairs, who helped coordinate the University’s participation.

“I’m thankful that my colleague, Associate Dean and Professor of English Anne Fernald, learned of this unique opportunity to support Saraceia Fennell’s simple yet powerful vision: promoting literacy, creativity, and sharing of stories of the Bronx, by and for Bronx residents in public space. It’s profoundly democratic and empowering, and consistent with our mission as the Jesuit university of New York City,” Zapata said.

Doyle, who in his role at HarperOne specializes in religion, spirituality, and health and wellness, with particular interest in alternative self-help, said the book festival brought together what he loves most about books and the Bronx.

“Nothing brings me more satisfaction than engaging new readers with great books and everything they promise in their pages. At the same time, the Bronx has meant so much to me—first as an undergraduate at Rose Hill, where I started to take up these promises in earnest, and more recently as a resident of the Bronx and northern Manhattan, where I continue to enjoy and benefit from the area’s diverse and vibrant communities, as well as its local artists and businesses that continue to make this part of New York one of the city’s best,” he said.

The New York Times covered the event, asking residents of the borough to give their thoughts on its first book fair:

“We need a festival like this. Representation definitely matters, so to have all of these panels and to hear all of this, it matters,” 22-year-old Megan Pedragon told the newspaper. Read more here.

Related:

How to Break Into Publishing: Advice from Editors, Agents, and Bestselling Author Mary Bly

A Conversation with Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s First Chief Diversity Officer

As a theater major on both the playwriting and directing tracks at Fordham, Kim says he found valuable connections between his experiential major and the University’s Core Curriculum. “A huge part of what we did was ask questions like: How are we engaging with our audience? What are our goals as artists, or as citizens of the world? These questions carried over to other classes and beyond,” says Kim.

Now, as program director at the 52nd Street Project, he is exploring how to be a teaching artist. Kim runs the nonprofit’s New Platforms program, helping to create classes in songmaking, dancemaking, and poetry that complement the project’s original focus on playmaking. Through theater, he says, “kids are following their questions rather than looking for a right answer,” just as he did at Fordham.

The project’s goal is not to create future star performers but to help city students, ages 9 to 18, discover their passions as they learn to collaborate and develop strong communication and presentation skills. The students also get the kind of one-on-one mentorship and broad exposure to the arts that they may not be getting at school.

“We keep our doors open every day after school, even for those not in our arts programs. There’s no right way to do theater, but there is a way that involves being brave and following your questions and your own sense of self,” Kim says. “Hopefully we create a space where our students feel they can do that.”

The class, The Bronx: Immigration, Race and Culture, focuses on the socioeconomic and cultural development of Bronx neighborhoods from the Great Depression to the present.

“This is the first time the same class has been taught simultaneously at two schools,” said Naison. “I think we can all agree that we’re better together than we would be learning separately.”

The students arrived to Fordham’s Rose Hill campus early for a tour of the grounds. A student ambassador led them around campus to see the McGinley Center, Coffey Field, Walsh Library, and other University hot spots.

“I want them to believe that a college like this could be an option for them,” said their high school teacher Aixa Rodriguez, FCRH’ 00. “I want them to have a great impression of the school.. And I hope this is something they want to aspire for.”

The lecture focused on the importance of local oral history and how to conduct an oral interview. Naison’s Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP) has collected over 300 oral interviews, now available on the Fordham Libraries’ website, in order to preserve the rich history of African Americans in the Bronx.

“Not everything is written down,” Naison said to the students. “Your lives are a part of history and sometimes it’s the most interesting part.”

Teaching by example, Naison then interviewed Rodriguez about her life growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s. Afterwards, the teachers took questions from both Fannie Lou and Fordham students. The discussion shifted from family life to the dangers of growing up during a time heavily influenced by drugs and violence.

“It was a great experience. I learned a lot about the area and my teacher’s life,” said Charles Davidson, a Fannie Lou student. “I’m looking to come here because it’s so close and I want to play basketball.

“Since I’m planning on becoming a lawyer, Fordham’s a great choice for me. I’m happy I was able to sit in on a class and get a sneak peek of the campus.”

This collaboration was a part of #BronxHistoryCollaborative, a social movement started by the BAAHP which brings Fordham University, Bronx Consortium High Schools, and other public schools together to discover local history and to build bridges in the community through education, said Naison.

“We want these students to be proud that they come from a place with such a great history,” he said. “We’re here to prove that you can help kids get ready for college by using their own history as a starting point.”

–Mary Awad