While I was the CRC & RECYouth coordinator at Hamilton Fish Recreation Center in the Lower East Side, during the 2009 Spring season the CRC headquarters gave all the After School Programs an assignment to have the kids create a comic book. The main character would be some sort of super hero who would teach the children / readers about recycling in the Parks. The irony was, we actually didn’t have a working recycling program at our park. After several inquiries (what to do with all the stuff we had been collecting for several weeks) we discovered that our sanitation workers in the Park just through our clearly separated recyclable collections mixed in with the regular trash.
This was a big break through moment for the kids, as I watched their enthusiasm ignite with the idea that they could become the teachers, educate others through their research (discovering how long it takes for some of these trash items to decompose and what things could actually be recycled) and this comic book creation, as well as become activists and potentially inspire real change in a flawed system.
The following comic book exceeded my own expectations as their mentor on this project. And yes, having gotten emailed around upper management for several months, ultimately it got in the hands of who ever is in charge of setting up such programs and by the following Fall season we were outfitted with recycling bins for both in side the recreation center and around the park, as well as an official pick up.
