“You often think of coming to Fordham at Lincoln Center as an urban experience, and this gives you something of an agricultural experience in addition to the benefits of being in an urban environment,” said Leslie Timoney, associate director of campus operations at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

For almost a decade, the garden—a small plot with three wooden plant beds—had lived in a sequestered, sunny spot bordering the 60th Street side of the plaza, above McMahon Hall. It grew out of a sustainability project developed by the Lincoln Center student environmental club, known formally as the Fordham College and the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center Environmental Club. 

Last April, the garden underwent a dramatic renovation. The environmental club e-board, with the help of facilities staff, doubled the original number of plant beds—each bed being roughly eight feet long, two feet wide, and 18 inches deep—and expanded the garden’s breadth of crops. 

“In the years prior to the renovations, there were a few short wooden beds for use, but with these new tall raised beds, they allow for more growing space and they add a more visually appealing factor to the garden,” explained Brittney Yue, president of the Lincoln Center environmental club. 

Inside the beds are roughly a dozen different plant strains. There are clusters of familiar crops—tomatoes, lettuce, garlic—among more unusual choices, like black beauty eggplants and pumpkins. The tomatoes are starting to ripen in the summertime heat, but it won’t be until early October that the pumpkin vines bear fruit. 

“We’ve never really had any sort of bountiful harvest until this renovation started,” said Yue. “This is the first time we’ve ever had a legit garden [at Lincoln Center].”

St. Rose’s Garden—a bigger version of the Lincoln Center garden—exists on the Rose Hill campus. Since 2012, members of the campus community have grown crops like collards, cabbage, and kale in the garden space behind Faculty Memorial Hall. 

Like its sister in the Bronx, the Lincoln Center garden gives much of its harvest to those who care for it, including student volunteers. Though anyone on campus is welcome to take a tomato here and there, said Yue, she hopes to increase community engagement with the garden. One possible plan is a campus-wide pumpkin carving event, given that the gourds grow to full size. Another idea is more academic. 

“One idea that our old [club]president had was to incorporate the garden into some classes,” said Yue, a senior psychology student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “If there’s any bio classes who do plant stuff or horticulture, we would love for them to be able to come out here and learn about the plants.” 

It’s something that, in a way, she already does. On a sunny July afternoon, Yue tended to the plants, particularly the tomatoes that had just begun to turn red. 

“That’s the great thing about fresh-grown gardens,” said Yue, smiling while washing a freshly picked cherry tomato with a nearby hose. “You can pluck them right off the vine.”

The April 20 garden effort was part of a series of events held from April 13 to April 22 that was organized by the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice (SEAJ) in honor of Earth Day. A global event that is observed annually on April 22, Earth Day is a call to action for communities around the work to protect the environment.

“Although the earth seems like this big, indestructible place, it’s actually quite fragile and delicate,” said first-year student Gabby Perez, a member of St. Rose’s Gardening Club. “When you have 7 billion humans on the planet emitting tons of fossil fuel into the air, fishing, and cutting down trees, that disrupts a lot of the natural world.”

Through activities like composting, which recycles food scraps and decomposed organic material, Perez said Fordham students are also learning how to eliminate waste and promote plant growth in St. Rose’s Garden.

“When you throw food in a trash bin as opposed to putting it a compost bin, it gets sent to a landfill and it produces a potent greenhouse gas called methane, or it just gets mummified in a landfill,” said Perez, who explained that the process is harmful to the environment. “It’s important for Fordham students to be aware of the environmental issues happening around them.”

One of the reasons Michael McCarty, a junior studying finance at the Gabelli School of Business, decided to participate in the gardening event was because it allowed him to gain hands-on experience in the garden.

“We’re preparing [garden]beds that used to be in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

St. Rose’s Garden was established in 2012 by Jason Aloisio, GSAS ’16. Based on two back lots behind Faculty Memorial Hall, the garden serves as a living laboratory for the University community.

Since it was founded, student volunteers have harvested a variety of organic fruits and vegetables, including watermelon, tomatoes, and kale.

This spring, McCarty expects tremendous growth from the seeds that he is helping to plant in the garden. In three or four months, he said the garden will be ” transformed.”

“We have the greenhouse set up and we’re out here putting in the effort,” he said.

SEAJ organized the Earth Day programming to raise awareness about how human activities can harm the environment and what students can do to help. Events included a sustainable flea market on campus; a clean-up of Pelham Bay Park; an environmental fair on Edwards Parade; a sustainable art event; and a screening of the 2014 documentary, Mission Blue, by oceanographer Sylvia Earle.

“This wire mill was in operation from 1848 to 1998,” Greenspan said in a November TEDxYouth talk she gave in Brookline, Massachusetts. The company that owned the site, Gilbert & Bennett Manufacturing, was innovative in its day. “They invented wire mesh there,” she said, which “allowed people to open up their windows with their new screens and enjoy the warm summer air without letting mosquitoes and other bugs inside their homes.”

Today, alas, the mill “lies derelict” and is classified as a brownfield site, contaminated by decades of metal manufacturing. “We’re not creating jobs, we’re not generating tax revenue, and we’ve really lost our heritage of the industrious working spirit that once existed there,” she said.

But where others see decay and waste, Greenspan sees potential.

A Sustainable Approach to Redevelopment

Five years ago, she and several other students responded to a call from local artist Jane Philbrick to examine ways to clean up and redevelop the site. What began as a high-school internship has become a vocation for Greenspan. With Philbrick, she is now a co-founder of TILL, a community-based real estate development company that is looking to transform the old site into a live-work space that would be anchored by artists and include commercial businesses, such as an indoor farm. And they’re aiming to do it in a way that can be applied to other brownfield sites throughout the country.

In addition to her usual coursework as a full-time economics major at Fordham, Greenspan spends hours each week studying real estate law, urban farming, phytoremediation, carbon storage, and other subjects with practical applications in an environmentally challenged world. “I find it very purposeful to work on this,” she says.

She points out that the built environment is “the largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions”—which is why she and members of her TILL team plan to use solar panels and heat pumps as part of their development model. But they aren’t letting carbon emissions embodied in the built environment off the hook, either.

“The steel and concrete we manufacture to pave over surfaces and build buildings emit many tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year,” she said. “So the central question for our team became: Wouldn’t it be great if we could turn large-scale real estate development into sites for CO2 storage, as opposed to the carbon factories they currently are?”

She said they’re proposing to use plants to “capture excess carbon in our atmosphere,” and to build new structures with cross-laminated timber, a type of engineered wood that, like all wood products, can store atmospheric carbon.

A Campus Thought Leader

At Fordham, Greenspan is president and co-manager of St. Rose’s Garden, a community plot near Faculty Memorial Hall, and she’s a student leader in the Social Innovation Collaboratory, a group of faculty, students, and administrators who promote social entrepreneurship.

Carey Weiss, the director of sustainability initiatives at Fordham, describes Greenspan as “an outstanding student thought leader,” someone who “leverages her coursework and outside interests to continually seek new ideas and methodologies for creating a better society.”

Greenspan is grateful for the “supportive network of thoughtful, interdisciplinary thinkers” at Fordham. Studying economics has aided her immensely in her work with both TILL and the collaboratory, she said.

“I am not naturally inclined to think about economic policy. But my classes have forced me to consider other perspectives, to view a problem from many different angles.”

Looking beyond graduation, Greenspan’s heart—and head—are with TILL.

“What began as a problem specific to my community in Connecticut has transformed into a solution that can be applied globally to slow down climate change,” she said in her TEDxYouth talk. “There are 2 to 3 million brownfields in the U.S. alone. What if we turned every one of these brownfields into economically productive carbon storage sites? That is a world I want to live in.”

—Maureen Mackey, FCRH ’81

Watch Olivia Greenspan’s TEDxYouth talk

The pair often throw spontaneous dinners for large groups. But on this rainy night they were expecting just a few friends. In their off-campus Bronx apartment, Otis Redding and Van Morrison tunes played, candles flickered, and their kitchen radiated warmth and a scent that was just barely sweet. Madsen was prepping the first course.

“I’m just making something to get you guys started,” he says to a guest, straightening up from the oven, where he’d been inspecting his loaf of sourdough. “I got into breadmaking last year. It’s really fun, because sourdough has a science. You have to create lacto-fermentation, you have to harvest your own yeast,” says the son of a chemistry teacher.

After quickly spraying some water into the oven to maintain humidity, he notes, “I’m working on perfecting crust. I remember being a little kid saying I don’t like the crust—now I’m so excited about crust!”

Madsen and Brown lived across the hall from each other freshman year and became fast friends, bonding over, among other things, their love of cooking. They moved in together last year, along with two other Gabelli students. They were excited to find an apartment with a nice kitchen and separate dining space, as well as a sprawling outdoor patio.

“We called this apartment ‘the Dream,’” Madsen says. “Other places were a little closer to campus, but we said, ‘this place has granite countertops!’” They’ve hosted large barbecues with homemade-barbecue-sauce ribs and live bands on their patio, as well as more low-key indoor gatherings. Last year, they had about 40 people over for a “Friendsgiving” feast—which included a 15-pound turkey and 15 pounds of ribs.

While he waits for Brown to come home with the evening’s main ingredients, Madsen gets to work on his spicy carrot soup, which he makes with carrots he picked from St. Rose’s Garden on the Rose Hill campus, where he volunteers. He’s also using some selects from his big batch of red and green peppers—spicy and sweet—which he grew himself. He dices and slices, tossing ingredients into the blender while keeping an eye on his bread. Soon he’ll plate them together—the sourdough ready to soak up the piping hot soup.

Brown arrives laden with packages from Arthur Avenue, where he and Madsen shop “almost exclusively.” He unwraps a thick, bright-red cut of beef from Vincent’s Meat Market (the “best butcher shop in the Bronx,” he says) a large silvery striped bass, and a slippery whole octopus, which he will confidently drop into a pot of boiling water.

Brown says he developed his culinary skills when he was a child. “I’m a really picky eater, so I cooked for myself,” except for when his father made southern food. “I made my own eggs—put stuff in them that I liked.”

Despite being busy college students and gourmet chefs, both young men have significant work responsibilities. Brown’s late father was an artist—a painter known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians—so Brown works with museums and galleries that show his father’s work. He’s also on the executive board of ASILI—the Black student alliance at Fordham—and is a research assistant with Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project. Madsen works as a bookkeeper in his father’s real estate development firm, which brought him to Australia for the summer to work with a client. Both students are studying entrepreneurship at Gabelli.

With so much going on, one wouldn’t think there’d be time for such epicurean endeavors. But the roommates say that cooking helps them “de-stress.” Also? “We just really love doing it,” says Brown, who, truth be told, is not a total amateur. He worked for a time for a chef in Arizona who’s now working in France. His favorite thing to cook? Coq au vin.

With his creamy peppercorn sauce simmering, the octopus boiling, and the steak in the oven, Brown sits at the dining table with his laptop open. “Sorry, I’m finishing a paper,” he says. It’s midterm time so he must multitask, but he’s not worried that anything will burn or boil over. “At this point, I’ve been cooking so long I have an internal timer.”

Meanwhile, Madsen’s got his mind on his peppers and how they might complement the octopus.

“Can I make the sauce, Bentley? Please, please?”

Brown gives him the OK. “Jake loves sauces,” he tells a guest.

Madsen heads to the stove. “This sauce is new—today,” he declares. He concocts a thick, sweet and spicy sauce using passion fruit juice, pineapple chunks, vinegar, ketchup, and several treasures from St. Rose’s Garden, including tomatillos and cayenne, scorpion, and Tabasco peppers.

Madsen uses his peppers to make batches of hot sauce, which he always keeps on hand. After a friend gave him a Carolina Reaper plant—which yields the hottest pepper in the world—he decided to challenge himself. “I said, ‘I’m gonna make a hot sauce that uses Carolina Reaper that isn’t masochistic.” His finished product uses mango, pineapple, ginger, and lime, and as promised, does not set the mouth on fire. (Though it’s still got plenty of kick.)

Soon friends are trickling into the apartment, and everyone’s sitting down to eat. Eleni Koukoulas, a Gabelli School senior, said she’s been over once or twice before to eat with the Fordham foodies.

“It’s not very conventional college,” she says. “You could just tell it’s something they really love, and that they love to share it with other people.”

As everyone digs in, Brown hears one of his other roommates come in the front door. “Hey, Phil,” he shouts. “Come get you some food!”

The Fordham network of students, faculty, alumni, and community members promoting innovative solutions to these challenges is called the Social Innovation Collaboratory. This group has already sponsored workshops on three different themes, with more being planned. Each workshop allows students to apply their academic knowledge and passion for creating social value to solving a specific problem.

Members of the Clean Cookstoves workshop partner with the United Nations’ Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in an effort to reduce the economic, climate, and health risks of inefficient stoves and dangerous cooking methods used in many countries around the world. The Food and Enterprise students collaborate with Slow Money NYC to examine how to evaluate and rate local sustainable food and farm initiatives. And the Urban Mobility team focuses on enhancing BMW’s new electric vehicles to expand sustainable transportation options for college students and New Yorkers.

Students from all backgrounds have joined the three workshops—from freshmen to graduate students, business majors to psychology majors, native New Yorkers to international students.

Brendan Dagher, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, helped design all three of the workshops. He says the diversity is one of their greatest strengths. “It encourages the kind of integrated thinking that creates novel solutions to deep-rooted problems.”

Though some students have no previous experience in the area of sustainability, others, like freshman Olivia Greenspan, participated in local sustainability projects while still in high school. At Fordham, Greenspan is an active executive board member of St. Rose’s Garden, the Rose Hill campus’s community garden. In her first semester, she proposed using a method of hydroponics (growing plants without soil) that is already being implemented by the group.

And she’s expanding her sustainability focus from food to transportation by joining the Urban Mobility workshop. “Every time I get more involved with sustainability I just see more and more value in it, and I see how feasible it is with the technology we have,” she says. “I feel like if I don’t contribute, it just might not happen. And when I’m doing it, I feel like I’m part of a larger movement.”

Carey Weiss, Fordham’s director of sustainability initiatives and social innovation, leads all three workshops. She says that one of the best things about these projects is how students in each of the workshops divide into small teams where everyone is an equal partner. They brainstorm together, and they’re all encouraged to share their unique perspective. Graduate students learn from freshmen, English students learn from biology students, and so on.

Weiss says that this format allows the workshops to “draw on the students’ individual passions, and they bring their whole selves to the table.”

This model not only gives students an inside glance at leading organizations, it expands students’ opportunities for valuable networking. And, according to Weiss, it promotes new and innovative ways of thinking.

“It’s action-oriented, and it’s impact-oriented,” she says, “and it stems from the Jesuit idea of being men and women for others.”

This spring, Greenspan and the other Urban Mobility students will pitch their finalized concepts to the team at BMW, and the company will choose which ideas to implement.

Greenspan says that working with the team has been an enriching experience, both academically and personally.

She has also received several summer internship offers because of her involvement with the workshop. “I’m not just making connections between what I learn in my classes and sustainable solutions,” she says. “I also have constant access to these amazing companies and internship opportunities.

“And I have a real sense of what it’s like to work on a productive, kind, and caring team.”