Student: Devon Snyder
Graduation date: May 2014
Capstone type: Thesis
Capstone project:
Project not yet linked to capstone record
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Community organizing has always been considered to be a series of trial and error. These difficulties are made more visible within movements that rely foundationally on the support and power of the common individual. The modern environmental movement embodies this ideology; however, there is an apparent disconnect between the words and actions of contemporary environmental outreach. In this thesis, I examine the ways in which environmental organizations engage with diverse communities, looking specifically at the means and discourse of community organizing. I focus on the Beacon Food Forest, an urban gardening project located in the south Seattle neighborhood of Beacon Hill, supposedly one of the “most diverse zip codes in the country.”[1] In my research, I found that the demography of the organization tended not to reflect that of the surrounding neighborhood. I discuss how such trends are the result of certain “barriers to participation,” and how the means of mitigating this lack of diversity often reinforce these barriers. Drawing from media releases, surveys, interviews, and public meetings and events, I trace how concepts of diversity and race are discussed in relation to the Beacon Hill community and the volunteer base of the organization. The successfulness of the project as defined by the satisfaction of the Beacon Hill community is analyzed within a framework of the neighborhood’s priorities with regards to the process of other similar projects. Parsing out the patterns of exclusion within this situated context, I use the case of the Beacon Food Forest as a cultural platform from which to approach the question of diversity as it pertains to the American mainstream environmental movement.