Former NYCHA Resident Awarded $200K Grant for Sustainability Activism

As a young man growing up at NYCHA developments across all five boroughs, Domingo Morales never used to think about the best uses for his trash.  

It wasn’t until he came across a Green City Force (GCF) training program flyer at his mother’s home in Wilson Houses that he was put on a pathway toward promoting a more sustainable future. GCF partners with NYCHA’s Office of Resident Economic Empowerment & Sustainability (REES) to exclusively recruit NYCHA youth for service learning training in the green sector. Mr. Morales, 28, credits the experience for giving him a “sustainability lens” on his community.   

The opportunity allowed him to land a job at a GCF composting site in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Mr. Morales learned all about how food scraps can be preserved to help the environment. Inspired by that experience, he became an activist for composting. In recognition of that activism, which has led the Brooklyn resident to a goal of creating compost sites across New York City, Mr. Morales was recently selected as one of only five winners of the inaugural David Prize, which comes with a $200,000 grant award.  

According to the foundation awarding the prize, it is a “celebration of individuals and ideas to create a better, brighter New York City.” While he was shocked to be chosen out of thousands of applicants, Mr. Morales noted it was only just the start of his work that he hopes will become a movement.  

“For me, it just gave me more motivation and more momentum to just keep going,” he said.   

Part of that work, he said, is educating GCF participants about the positive impacts of composting, while also encouraging them to think differently about what they do with their food waste.  

“The only way to change unsustainable behavior is to teach sustainability; you have to educate,” he stressed. 

Tonya Gayle, executive director of Green City Force, said Mr. Morales embodies GCF’s core values of passion and perseverance. 

“Our mission is to train young leaders to power a green and inclusive economy, through service,” she said. 

In response to those who may consider composting to be burdensome, Mr. Morales points out how one third of the waste that is sent to landfills is actually an organic resource. By reducing the waste supply that ends up at landfills, communities can instead help convert it into soil fertilizer used to grow fresh, healthy food, Mr. Morales explained.  

“If you think that compost is horrible and it stinks, you’ve got the whole idea wrong,” he said. “Composting is what we do as humans to manage our waste in a way that nature can handle it.” 

While Mr. Morales continues to help improve the Farms at NYCHA, he is moving forward with his next venture: an education initiative he calls Compost Power, intended to establish more composting sites throughout the city. The most immediate goal is to get five sites processing a minimum of 50 tons of waste per year by the end of 2020. He hopes to provide residents in underserved neighborhoods the opportunity to compost while creating more eco-friendly jobs.  

“If we can prove that it works at the sites that (GCF) already has, then we will have the potential to expand and build more of these eco hubs throughout NYCHA, creating more green jobs for the residents,” he said.

To learn more about opportunities with Green City Force, visit: greencityforce.org