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Section 3. Gaining Public Support for Addressing Community Health and Development Issues

Example: The Kids Who Killed an Incinerator

Destiny Watford was a high school senior, she learned that the country’s largest trash incinerator was going to be built less than a mile from her school and the house where she lived with her family. The proposed facility would be built on a 90-acre tract in her Baltimore neighborhood, and had the eager support of state and local political leaders, who praised it as a job-creating, green-power initiative. Watford, an introverted and diligent student, hadn’t thought much about environmental issues. But a facility that would burn an immense amount of garbage near her community, even with the promised sophisticated air filters, didn’t seem celebration worthy. So she partnered with a handful of her fellow classmates from Benjamin Franklin High School to learn as much as possible about the proposed incinerator. Watford and her classmates caused community activists in Baltimore to target over twenty government agencies that had contracts with the incinerator, ultimately leading to the demise of the incinerator project.

Read more about The Kids Who Killed an Incinerator.

Contributed by Lia Thompson, University of Kansas, Community Tool Box Intern.