BIG blacks in green

everybody’s global green practices network

™
(Blacks in Green)

We Are Your Green Community
Education & Trade Association

Link. Leverage. Lead.

We are a Community Education & Trade Association, born to remind generations of our great cultural legacy - which is our stewardship of the land, and to reinvent that legacy in the age of climate change. As Community Educators, BIG™ teaches communities of color the risks of global warming and the health and wealth opportunities of the new green economy. As a Trade Association, BIG™ works to foster and sustain green, neighbor-owned businesses in black communities. Further, our focus is to recreate community wealth by cultivating next generations of engineers and new generations of green manufacturers. We are proudly one of America's most diverse environmental networks; yet we stand for self-help, clear that no sustainable substitute exists. Our stand is informed and inspired by America's great Underground Railroad story — which teaches our need for allies across the bounds of race and class— but only after we evaluate, declare, and prepare for our own freedom-seeking. Our vision is “self-sustaining African diaspora communities” and robust black participation in the new green economy. Our mission is to link, leverage, and lead through a new breed of environmentalists. A key goal was to launch a green business incubator in 2009. Call BIG to apply. Naomi Davis, Founder & President 773-569-4464; daughterstrust@aol.com www.blacksingreen.org.

Build A Village…Make An Oasis
Oasis-Making™ generates green, self-sustaining African American neighborhoods, and will ignite a greenvillage-building movement that affirms, “Yes we can make an oasis wherever we live!” BIG Village™ is an efficient delivery system for both ancient and innovative green products, practices, nd services. Imagine your neighborhood as a beautiful walkable mixed-income village where green homes, businesses and the commercial buildings housing them are owned by neighbors, and your full-spectrum of consumer needs are supplied through a nearby network of vibrant commercial hubs. Your Saturday errands need no car: the dry cleaner, shoe repair, produce market, bookstore, bank, printer, and salon, are all at the
right distance for a “fat-melting” walk. In less than a generation this picture of what was once many black neighborhoods has all but disappeared, replaced — almost without exception and without regard to wealth — by colonized black communities where smart, hard-working neighbors have no means for circulating their dollars locally. Nor have blacks owned a significant percentage of our world’s factories. This shall change. conditions common to African American communities can be transformed by an uplift that results from inventing-investing-manufacturing-merchandising our way out of global warming — solving triple bottom line equations with a balanced, holistic approach. It is compounded by systemic problems which revolve around the cycle of malnutrition, poisoning and addiction… health disparities in aids, asthma, diabetes and cancer…self-hatred projected…miseducation, drop-outs, illiteracy…unprepared parenting and state-supported single-mother homes…hyper-incarceration, recidivism and violence…barriers to voting…and underemployment.
Whole-system thinking created and sustains these crises, and only whole-system thinking will transform them. Yet, one village at a time we can be self-sustaining.

A BIG Hub™ is an epicenter for green training, development, and lifestyle transformation created to generate green leaders “in the 'hood,” and to ensure access/exit points into sustainable jobs, careers, and enterprises. By customizing, connecting, and coaching Hubs, our intent is to synergize efforts that help create and sustain neighbor-owned businesses, the cornerstone of African American self-sustainability.