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May 31, 2026
What happens when young people are given real access to hands-on experiences and community in green spaces?
The second salon of our Learning to Citizen: Tales of Youth Voices, Agency, and Care series took place on Saturday, May 30th, 2026. Our guests were Nando Rodriguez, Senior Manager for Environmental Programming at The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis), and two BroSis members: Camila Salcedo, 16, a high school sophomore at Thurgood Marshall Academy, and Elias De Leon, 17, a junior at Kipp Charter School — both of whom have been part of the BroSis community for several years.
The World BroSis Builds
BroSis is a West Harlem-based nonprofit that has spent more than 30 years working alongside Black and Latinx young people — offering unconditional love, wraparound support, and programming designed to help youth examine their roots, define their own stories, and awaken their sense of agency.
One of the many things that makes their approach unique is how they view their green spaces. As Nando highlighted, they built an intentional space where young people can codesign sustainable systems, learn about food empowerment, community organizing, horticultural sciences, and get to a point where they see themselves as environmentalists.
Nando's Personal Trajectory
What also makes BroSis's environmental program distinctive is how it came to be. Nando grew up on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and '90s — a neighborhood of vacant lots, community gardens that he walked past but never entered, and green spaces that nobody had ever told him were his to access. As a teenager, he joined two organizations that would shape the rest of his life: Open Road of New York, which gave him hands-on environmental education, and BroSis, which gave him community, identity, and a sense of what leadership could look like.
"It wasn't through passion or will," Nando reflected during the salon. "It was through experiences, access, and opportunity that developed my love for the environment."
Decades later, he is recreating that experience deliberately and systematically, one young person at a time.
Meeting Agency Where It Lives
True to educator Deb L. Morrison's invocation that animates this entire series — meet agency where it lives, begin with what people care about and the places they inhabit — BroSis's approach starts with doing things together, not with teaching young people what to think about the environment.
Young people plant raised beds at the Frank White Memorial Garden at 143rd Street, a 6,000-square-foot NYC Parks Department Green Thumb Garden that BroSis operates in Hamilton Heights. They learn to care for street trees, removing invasive weeds and replanting flowers. They compost. They use power tools. They design projects. None of it is assigned in the way school assigns things — young people get curious, ask questions, and keep coming back. "We meet them where they are," Nando said. "Pushing environmental education and environmental activism onto them is probably gonna push them away." Instead, BroSis does hands-on activities together — and waits for the young people to ask the questions. Once they do, Nando said, they are now asking for your support and guidance, rather than having answers pushed on them.
Elias described the Frank White Memorial Garden as "a place I could call home. I could just walk in freely, walk around the garden, be in the hammocks, just relax, hang out with my friends." And he was direct about what that access means in New York City: "A lot of people don't have access to the environment sometimes here in New York. And BroSis is a great example of the privilege of having access to green spaces."
Camila, described by Nando as quiet and thoughtful until she's fully engaged — and then impossible to stop — has been photographed mid-construction project at a partner garden, power drill in hand, grinning.
What Screens Can't Give You
When asked about the difference between time in the garden and time on his phone, Elias was reflective and clear. He described camping trips with BroSis where there was no service, no chargers — just the group, in the forest, having to be present with each other. "I think that really changed how I see nature. I'm living on planet Earth, and I shouldn't just waste my time on a screen. And, you know, really make memories with the community at BroSis and my friends, my coworkers, and the staff around here."
He also spoke about what BroSis has given him beyond the garden. "I think I have a better drive to be more academic, and be more disciplined."
Several people in the session noted how much that resonated — the way that feeling genuinely part of something, and feeling genuinely useful, seems to show up in every other corner of a young person's life.
The Hot Box and 1,000 Systems
The conversation turned to the centerpiece of BroSis's current environmental campaign: a goal of installing 1,000 community composting systems across all five boroughs of New York City.
The vehicle for this is a design Nando helped create as a teenager at Open Road of New York — a passive aeration composting system called the Hot Box, which he co-patented. Unlike conventional composting, which requires regular human turning of the pile (and disrupts the microbial ecosystem in the process), the Hot Box uses a pipe design that draws air through the system naturally as heat rises. The result is finished compost that has tested closer to humus — the richest, most decomposed form of organic matter — than most mechanically-tended systems produce.
What began with 17 sites two years ago has grown to 92 active Hot Box locations across New York City as of the salon. The goals of the campaign are layered and interconnected: reducing greenhouse gases, remediating urban soil, growing healthier food, building young people's immune systems through contact with living earth, and — critically — creating youth employment.
"Where do young people find work? This could be it," Nando said. "Having community compost in every neighborhood could encourage more youth employment."
When participants asked how to bring more of this kind of work into their own communities and schools, Nando's answer was disarmingly direct: start with the hands-on activity. Let them ask questions. Go one plant at a time, one tree at a time. "Once they get into it, they don't stop."
BroSis's Green Space as a Different Kind of Space
A question from the chat asked both students whether their experience at BroSis resembled their experience in school. "My teachers are there to support me academically," Elias said. "BroSis staff and members are there to support you in anything else — your dreams, your education, your culture, the diversity it brings. It's very different."
Nando added something important about why that difference matters so much for the young people BroSis works with. When teenagers move through most urban spaces — parks, stores, their own blocks — they are often met with suspicion, hostility, or indifference. They learn to wear what he called the mask of survival: to present as tough, guarded, hard to reach.
Green spaces, he argued, are one of the few environments where those guards can come down organically. "If we saw each other at the same time on the street, we'd look at each other differently. But when we see each other in the garden or on a community farm, we're already in a space where our guards should be down and we should now have this conversation."
From Conversation to Action
The salon closed with breakout rooms and then a plenary discussion about what each participant could do in the next 30 days to create more opportunities for young people to citizen — to explore their interests, find their agency, and express their voices.
Nando's contribution to that conversation was characteristically generous. In the breakout room he described his approach to building partnerships: showing up to community gardens and organizations not with a pitch, but with an offer — can we come work on your land with a group of young people? As one participant put it in the plenary debrief, it's like a houseguest who shows up asking how they can help — and soon you're doing dishes together and making plans to see each other again.
Participants also raised the question of the rights of nature — an emerging legal framework that grants rivers, forests, and green spaces protections under the law — and how that connects to the work of ensuring future generations have access to the spaces being built today.
As the session came to a close, the focus turned toward real-world collaboration and ongoing global exchange. Emmanuel Ponchon invited participants to take immediate action by joining or forming "Working Circles" to continue exploring these themes. Capturing the spirit of the event, the BroSis team concluded with a direct offer to keep the momentum going: "If you want me to have some young people be a part of your working groups... We have a group called Community Organizing, and their whole purpose is to help pass on what they have learned and what they're doing."
Resources and Links
To learn more about The Brotherhood Sister Sol:
Follow Nando's Hot Box initiative on Instagram: @hotbox.composting
Legislation to follow: Participant Al Kurland noted that pending New York State legislation sponsored by State Senator Robert Jackson, S06763 (contact: johanna@senatorjackson.com) and Jo Anne Simon in Assembly A 01106 (simonj@nyassembly.com) would require participatory citizenship education across grades 5–12, including hands-on, project-based approaches.
Working Circles: Emmanuel Ponchon invited participants to join or start a Working Circle — small groups forming in between salons to continue exploring, connecting, and taking action on the themes that surfaced. Learn more and join here.
If you couldn't join us, the recording from this salon is now available on our YouTube channel.
During the summer months, our team will be working behind the scenes to strengthen partnerships, seek funding, and plan future programming. The relationships and ideas sparked in the salons will continue through Working Circles, collaborations, and ongoing exchanges among participants around the world.
We'll be back in the fall with new conversations and new guests. In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you at info@edfortheworldwewant.net, and we invite you to join our WhatsApp Group and stay connected on LinkedIn.
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