When Oliver came to New Haven as a Yale student, he committed to teaching as a Director of a Yale student-tutoring program for disadvantaged New Haven children. Thus began his deep attachment to the community. While so many of their Yale peers chose to pursue lucrative Wall Street careers, Oliver and his wife, a Yale student as well, found a wealth of human potential in New Haven’s own diamond-in-the-rough neighborhoods. The two stayed on after graduation. Committing to improving their adopted community, Oliver Barton founded the New Haven Ecology Project (NHEP), which includes the Common Ground charter high school.

On its 30-acre urban farm in New Haven, Connecticut, NHEP intertwines environmental equity and a comprehensive education as the means to achieve a more just community. The program has become a leader in advancing a sustainable agriculture agenda for the city and in promoting increased availability of organic produce, better awareness of our local natural resources, and improved stewardship of the ecology, especially by young people.

The Project runs summer camps, a farm that provides organic produce to soup kitchens, shelters, and other service providers, as well as an innovative high school where students learn to appreciate and support the environment as they tackle 21st century educational challenges. NHEP has made its holistic influence felt around the city, bringing together concerns for the watershed with the educational uplift of disadvantaged communities. From this unique project has come a blossoming of community gardens in once desolate neighborhoods (Oliver started one of the first in his own New Haven neighborhood). Inner city teens not only attend the High School and take part in the urban gardening, but also sell surplus produce at the local farmers' markets. This outreach of the project managers and the students has brought organic produce to market in most of the city's neighborhoods, enabling local residents in underserved neighborhoods a chance to purchase healthy, affordable organic produce. That neighborhood students cultivated this produce instills pride as it helps succor the social bonds in urban areas in which the social fabric had frayed.

Oliver Barton and his family have lived in the neighborhood for almost two decades. Through their commitment and with the help of their community, Oliver and his wife have created an ecological project and an innovative educational institution around which an underserved community could open a charter school, erect new buildings, clear land for a farm, and redeem property that had become a wasteland. The NHEP strengthens our connection to and respect for the natural environment, and in doing so, it unites diverse, underserved neighborhoods, revealing that among the most radiant and productive of gardens we must nurture includes the one of human potential -- and community.

To learn more about Oliver and his cause, and how you can make a difference, please visit:
www.nhep.com.

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