Abby, Dan, and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the fourth Wednesday of Uptown Summer to screen the soil samples taken in the prior week for lead. We did not detect lead in the samples taken from the Collard City Garden and Troy Little League, meaning that the samples contain less than 200 parts per million of lead.

While we were doing the testing, The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s radio team recorded some of our group discussion that you can listen to here.

Photos by Tara Bryan.

The Our Soil team held a virtual community meeting tonight with the Soil Justice Fellows and other residents in Troy to give an overview about the soil workshops at NATURE Lab in August, collectively set expectations for those workshops, and answer questions.

You can watch a recording of the meeting here.

Abby, Dan, and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the third Wednesday of Uptown Summer to collect soil samples for analysis. Dan will set the samples to dry and sieve them to remove particles and debris larger than 2 mm before next week. We took samples from the Troy Little League and Collard City Garden, and next week we will screen the samples for lead using the Community Soil Study Toolkit.

While we collecting samples, The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s radio team recorded some of our group discussion that you can listen to here.

Dan and Hannah joined the Uptown Summer teens on the second Wednesday of Uptown Summer to think about what it would mean for us to use science to analyze our environment for pollutants. Our discussion prompt was a quote from two science education researchers who wrote that “science is one way of knowing that produces powerful insights and dangerous oversights that emerge from its development as an institution of Western imperialism” (Morales-Doyle and Frausto, 2021). These researchers propose situating science within a particular framework that they call Youth Participatory Science, which they compare and contrast to Youth Participatory Action Research in their work.

We looked at the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that no amount of lead in the body is known to be safe. We then related this health guidance to the various regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on lead in air, water, and soil, and built some physical intuition about the meaning of these regulations to our health.

Figure 1 from Daniel Morales-Doyle & Alejandra Frausto (2021). “Youth participatory science: a grassroots science curriculum framework,” Educational Action Research, 29:1, 60-78.

Saed was interviewed by McKenna Conners of The Sanctuary for Independent Media on WOOC 105.3 about the Our Soil project. Saed discussed his role with the Our Soil project and the complexities of soil and prevention of exposure to pollutants that soil may contain. You can listen to the radio interview here.

Abby, Sarah, and Hannah posted flyers on the blocks surrounding NATURE Lab to announce a community meeting to introduce the Soil Justice Fellows to the broader group of residents in North Troy, and to collectively set expectations for the workshops. The meeting will be held virtually on July 25th at 7pm. You can register here.

Flyer design by Sarah Bachinger.