Charlotte Kahn
Now that I am retired and facing, as we all are, the cruel and effective destruction by the Trump Administration of so many things we might otherwise have considered progress and victories, it’s difficult to look backward without detachment and impossible to look forward without determination to resist and reject this new reality.
However, to be brief about the past, for 15 years I served as the co-founding Executive Director of Boston Urban Gardeners, which we created as an antidote to the violence surrounding Boston’s school desegregation in the 70’s. Over the years it grew to include not only the development of community gardens on previously vacant lots but youth programs, neighborhood open space planning and a job training program in urban land management and landscape construction.
After merging that organization with another, I worked for the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts (TEAM) with Jim Braude and many others to defeat a draconian right-wing tax initiative that would have undermined the Commonwealth’s nonprofit sector and decimated, literally, much of the best of the public sector. I then worked for 22 years for the Boston Foundation, Greater Boston’s community foundation, first as Director of Boston’s participation in a Rockefeller Foundation-funded six-city Persistent Poverty Project, then as Director of the Boston Community Building Initiative and finally, for the last 15 years, as a founder and Director of the Boston Indicators Project. All of these projects brought together diverse stakeholders racially, economically and across sectors. The first to understand and develop local data-driven strategies to address intergenerational poverty, the second to develop a curriculum to foster leadership and community building skills in low-income communities, the latter to identify goals and measures of progress across ten sectors in Boston, its neighborhoods and the region. The latter was seen as a model nationally and internationally and awarded numerous honors. At one point, for example, I found myself in Istanbul at an OECD conference, “Statistics, Knowledge and Policy,” presenting the Boston Indicators Project alongside the Mayors of Istanbul and Madrid. Every two years, Project staff compiled a detailed report on trends in Boston and the Greater Boston region, with mounting attention to global trends of increasing significance at the local level such as economic globalization, automation and climate change.
While I’m proud of that work, I finally had to conclude that people don’t actually make rational decisions based on objective data, so I retired to focus specifically on climate change. I’m now on several boards, write a bi-weekly climate action column for our local newspaper in Ipswich MA that is often picked up by other community papers, work on specific legislation, strategize about and invest in biochar projects (a way to sequester carbon biologically), and have begun to write a short climate action handbook that I hope will fill a missing niche between books too long to appeal to non-fanatics and lists that are frustratingly devoid of detail. (I’m hoping to post my columns on line but haven’t figured that out yet.)