Photo Credit: The Chinatown Project
Chinatown HOPE
Chinatown HOPE is a collective of Chinatown organizations with the aim of coming together to leverage and build upon existing assets to have a greater, lasting impact on working class residents in Boston Chinatown. Community engagement began in summer of 2022 to understand what the Chinatown community thought a healthy neighborhood looked like, and resulted in our 3 branched intervention. Chinatown HOPE was funded through Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Community-based Health Initiative to decrease social isolation and increase community cohesion by activating open space in Chinatown through gardening, arts, cultural programming, and resident leadership development.
Branches of Chinatown HOPE
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The gardening brigade focuses the community’s desire for greenery and gardening opportunities. The brigade is focused on providing Chinatown residents with opportunities to garden through Chinatown Backyard, gardening workshops, and advocating for gardening spaces in apartment complexes. The gardening brigade is also bringing greenery to Chinatown through planters at Phillips Square. Additionally, the gardening brigade offers nature tours.
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Chinatown HOPE promotes emotional wellness through arts and culture offering activities and events in open spaces around Chinatown. The wellness activities are designed to increase social connection through interactive outdoor activities.
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Chinatown continues to feel the impacts of highway development, institutional expansion, and downtown revitalization. These forms of inequity has have a significant long-term impact on the health and vitality of the neighborhood. We demand that the City of Boston and State of Massachusetts provide more public investment dollars into developing and activating open space in Chinatown for the health and well-being of the community. Specifically, we ask:
For the City to capitalize on redesign and greening of Phillips Square in FY25
For the State to permanently protect, expand, and invest in Reggie Wong Park
For the City to add a public park near the long-awaited Chinatown branch library project
For the City and the State to prioritize green infrastructure projects in Chinatown for heat and flood mitigation
Increase tree canopy in Chinatown
The Collective
Establish a gardening brigade that creates opportunities for residents and other stakeholders to feel less socially isolated and more connected to the community
Provide public events in open spaces in Chinatown that are designed to increase the emotional well-being of the community
Increase gardening brigade members sense that collective voice matters
Active open space as strategy to call for more state and city investment
Demonstrate how integration of arts and culture is central to neighborhood planning
Strengthen relationship with other institutions around Chinatown