On Sunday, August 5, 2024, Fitz Books and Waffles in Buffalo hosted the Vintage and Vinyl Pop Up, where community members enjoyed free music from local DJs and connected with a wide range of vendors selling vintage clothing and vinyl records.

It’s August now, and all the flower fans who visited Buffalo’s 30th annual Garden Walk Buffalo festivities are somewhere enjoying the hundreds of pictures they undoubtedly took walking in neighborhoods like mine. I live in the Bryant neighborhood, where the founders of Garden Walk live on the appropriately named “Garden Walk Way.”

On Sunday, July 28, 2024, Burning Books bookstore hosted their third annual community block party at 420 Connecticut Street on the West Side of Buffalo, NY, raising awareness for local social justice campaigns and providing family recreation for West Side residents. Over 100 Buffalo residents braved the scorching 90-degree late July heat to enjoy the various attractions, including a giant bouncy house obstacle course, dunk tank, and community tables and booths hosted by progressive community organizations like PUSH-Buffalo, Democratic Socialists of America, and Urban Roots.

The province of North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), is home to a vibrant tapestry of mountain rain forests and savannas, woven together by the rivers that feed Lake Edwards and Lake Kivu. It is also a region that is torn apart by war. The interests of neighboring countries and international economic forces have fueled the violence that has displaced more than 2.8 million people and is devastating the local ecosystems. Amidst the ongoing chaos, however, water and earth guardians continue to work to create a better future for their communities and their more-than-human neighbors. One of these brave humans is Justin Lumoo Paluku, who works with the Initiative pour le Progrès et la Protection de l'Environnement (IPPE), or the Initiative for Environmental Progress and Protection.

At 6pm on July 18, 2024, Western New York Child Care Action Team (WNYCCAT) hosted a community celebration for the child care industry’s rank and file. WYNCCAT is an activist organization whose mission is “to educate, investigate, plan, strategize, advocate and provide swift actions that lead to productive, long term, results and solutions that positively impact the child care community across all modalities.”

“I am not optimistic. I think it will get harder and harder.” This was St. Lawrence County (NY) farmer Dan Kent’s response when asked how climate change will impact local farmers in the years to come. Localized farming practices have both economic and environmental advantages for the North Country. But with warming temperatures and varying weather patterns, local farmers in the region will need to find ways to adapt in order to maintain their livelihoods and retain the benefits of local food systems.

On Thursday, July 20, 2023, Abra Lee, ornamental horticulturalist and Black historian, presented research from her forthcoming monograph, “Conquer the Soil.” This public lecture inaugurated the 2023 Garden Walk series of events, coordinated by Gardens Buffalo Niagara, which includes the East Side Garden Walk, on July 22-23, 2023, and the Buffalo Garden Walk, on July 29-30, 2023. In other words, Buffalo has a two-week flower festival – and Abra Lee got us started.

The East Side Garden Walk brochure strikes me as a rich primary source on cultural politics, nonprofit orientation, and community power in Buffalo. I’m a historian, so I imagine this brochure being useful to a young scholar in 2050, when she’s trying to understand how the Buffalo Renaissance of the early 2000s transitioned into the re-urbanization of the city.

Ms. Gail Wells is Founder of Buffalo Freedom Gardens and a Project Consultant for Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo. Founded in 2020, Buffalo Freedom Gardens has two aims, first, to help residents create sustainable food sources on the East Side of Buffalo through urban farming and, second, to bring the vibrancy of horticulture to urban spaces. Between 2020 and 2021, Ms. Wells and Buffalo Freedom Gardens helped more than 80 residents start gardening – front-yard, backyard, raised bed, and container gardens – to feed their households and beautify their homes.

Sara E. Jablonski is a 4-H Team Educator in the Cornell Cooperative Extension Erie County. She develops 4-H Youth Development clubs in the Buffalo, NY, and Amherst, NY, areas. She helps young people find their spark! She is one of my colleagues at Cornell in Buffalo, and she was kind enough to share with Weave News the work she does in the community and the flowers that she admires in Buffalo.

I’ve lived in a city most of my life. Save 5 years in Canton, NY, as a St. Lawrence student, I have lived in either New York City (21 years) or City of Buffalo (16 years). I’m a city creature, ranging through one or another major city. Flowers and gardens have not always been of interest to me. In New York City, I lived close enough to Central Park to enjoy some of nature’s bloom. Three blocks from my railroad apartment in El Barrio was the 97th street entrance to the park. As a teen, it wasn’t the park’s green spaces that attracted me, but the hilly walkways that outlined the grassy field. I blazed those roads with my bike, catching enough speed to soar off short ramps made of broken sidewalk…

On Friday, June 23, I joined the Fellows on two tours, one of the People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH-Buffalo) Green Economic Development Zone and another of an urban farm administered by Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP). On both tours, I was chasing flowers with my phone – I’m obsessed. But I found much more than flower pictures. I found myself on the grassroots, too, a drop of dew shimmering in sight of Eden.

One April morning in 2021, I snapped a cell phone picture of a peony that was growing outside my mom’s house in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. It was toward the end of the COVID pandemic. The term “new normal” was all the rage. I didn’t know it, then, but I was searching for love, and I had found it. This morning, the sun was beaming; the flowers were stretching for sunlight; and I was falling head over heels for the flowers of Buffalo.

By Gwendolyn Deuel

In this investigative article created through the St. Lawrence Citizen Journalism Incubator (SLCJI), Gwendolyn Deuel examines the fallout from the cancellation of SUNY Potsdam’s CLEAR program, which offered conferences, workshops, summer camps, non-credit programs, and training seminars to the community in the North Country.

By John Collins

On an early fall weekend, a diverse group of North Country residents gathered on the campus of St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, to inaugurate an innovative new experiment in grassroots journalism: the St. Lawrence Citizen Journalism Incubator.

By Jessica Sierk

What happens when high school students in rural northern New York get the chance to speak for themselves, through art, about the pressures they are facing? Jessica Sierk describes the genesis and implementation of a unique community art collaboration bringing together students from Canton Central School and St. Lawrence University.

By Sheila Murray

As a transplant to the Boston area, it’s been interesting to familiarize myself with the city through the lens of current politics and social movements.  Unlike my years growing up in a small New Hampshire town and my time at university in upstate New York, Boston is positively bursting with events. That said, event spaces are not always conventional.  Here, a friend’s apartment is the scene for a “Women’s Brunch;” there, breweries become writing labs, bouldering gyms host “postcard parties,” and a tattoo parlor converts into a local artist marketplace.  In the past few months, my eyes have been on community engagement and the spaces that crop up as hosts.

By Andrew Watson

It is the morning of January 16th, four days before Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. It is, coincidentally, four days before many believe the end of the world will begin. For Brian Bennett, his wife Ann, and his daughter Catherine, it is just Monday. The Bennetts, owners and operators of Bittersweet Farm in Heuvelton, New York, are resistance fighters. However, they do not fight with guns, uniforms, or marching orders; their fight requires hand tools, a 1958 International Harvester, and an extensive knowledge of heritage breed ruminants and poultry.