Alumna Naomi Davis Receives $10 Million Grant from Biden-Harris Administration
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Founder of Blacks in Green (BIG), Naomi Davis received a breakthrough grant award to advance environmental justice in front line communities. The grant, supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will be dispersed over five years and will be used to establish technical assistance centers, trainings, and other community support in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, and across 35 tribal lands. Davis, who is an alum of the law school’s LLM Real Estate program, will work with the University of Illinois School of Public Health/Chicago and Smart Energy Design Assistance Center/Urbana-Champaign and 2 community-based partners to drive Justice40 federal funding to EJ community organizations, especially those committed to building “thriving communities” using BIG’s 8 Principles of Green-Village-Building and Sustainable Square Mile system.
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BIG teaches its neighbors to be their own emergency management system here in the Age of Climate Crisis by building communities to be “buffers of resilience” against the harms of global warming with “walk-to-work, walk-to-shop, walk-to-learn, walk-to-play villages” anchored in the new green economies of energy, horticulture, housing, tourism, and waste; and measured by successfully increasing the household income of its residents along the way.
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Read below as Davis discusses BIG’s plan to support sustainable, equitable neighborhood development across Black America, beginning here in Chicago with their West Woodlawn pilot.
UIC Law: Can you tell me a little about Blacks in Green?
Naomi Davis: Blacks in Green is an environmental justice and economic development non-profit agency in the Historic West Woodlawn community of Chicago. BIG is the creator of the Sustainable Square Mile™ – a whole-system solution for the whole-system problem common to Black communities everywhere, considered the gold standard for Black community economic development…where African American families create green, self-sustaining, mixed-income, walkable-villages where they own the businesses, own the land, and live the conservation lifestyle ~ what we call “the beautiful life.”
UIC Law: What sparked the idea for it?
Naomi Davis: My witness across 5 decades of the degradation of the Black community in terms of prosperity, self-reliance, and engagement…like the neighborhood where I grew up in St. Albans, Queens, NYC. My despair and unwillingness and to go on without at least trying to do something to contribute to the restoration of our African American place in the world.
UIC Law: What impact have you created and seen in the community you serve?
Naomi Davis: We have seen people’s eyes light up with recognition and their excitement rise when we describe our vision of ‘putting it all together’ under our 8 Principles of Green Village Building™. They’ve seen us working for free for 12 years with no budget or staff, collaborating with others – and in the past 4 years double our income every year and then land this $10M grant as the only community-based organization in the country who dreamt we could and should land it.
We dared to implement from day one a whole-system solution we declared could transform the whole-system problem common to Black communities everywhere…and went on to graduate solar energy installers and green infrastructure gardeners, connect contractors to financing, bring free water purification, heat pump technology, and lead service line replacement to their homes. [We were able to] introduce them to the power of their voice at ICC hearings which unfairly increase household energy costs.
We partied with them in celebration of our Great Migration legacy of triumph against all odds at our Emmett & Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum. We can say, and be believed, that the billions of dollars we need are coming over the decades we will need to build Sustainable Square Miles out of our blight across BlackAmerica…and now we’re recruiting households to join our first 3-year experiment to increase household income with coaching and mentoring in applying our 8 Principles — all these free things and more are our sacred joy to provide.
People are impacted by probably the greatest gift we offer, which is the indestructible power of belief in their power to create from nothing. And we’re now invited to Cleveland and Houston and Miami and Baltimore and Detroit to bring our Sustainable Square Mile model…and we’re not stopping until people can see and touch and feel and “spend” our vision for self-sustaining Black communities everywhere.
UIC Law: What is the EJ TCTAC and what work will BIG be doing on this grant?
Naomi Davis: The EPA selected Blacks in Green to serve as an Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center (EJ TCTAC) with a $10M grant over five years. This Center will provide technical assistance, training, and related support to communities and their partners with environmental justice concerns across EPA’s Region 5. This critical investment will provide environmental and energy justice resources such as:
- Assistance in navigating federal grant applications and identifying funding sources
- Training on program development and administration
- Cultivating Sustainable Square Mile systems to build thriving communities
BIG will serve as lead in this TCTAC, in collaboration with the following front line, community-based and community serving organizations, building this program together, to provide “front-door access” for people and communities across the region seeking environmental and justice solutions:
- Environmental Health Watch (EHW)
- Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association (MTERA)
- Black Environmental Leaders Association (BEL)
- School of Public Health (SPH) – University of Illinois, Chicago
- Smart Energy Design Assistance Center (SEDAC) – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
UIC Law: How have you incorporated what you learned at UIC Law into your work at BIG? What knowledge are you continuing to use in your work?
Naomi Davis: In the Real Estate LLM program – in the weeds of legal process and documents, players and consequences, my fear of the extreme complexity of transactions, and the shroud of mystery cloaking “how to get there,” I was nevertheless inspired to realize a bottom line that’s kept me pressing up and out with but a seed of our Sustainable Square Mile system over these many decades: that it’s all made up…that someone had an idea and advanced it into the systems I was studying…draped it in form and function and pressed it into service…until it was the Rule…and that’s exactly what BIG is doing ~ creating a narrative from nothing and normalizing it for the greater good. I was haunted by an idea I could not name and an identity I could not see – until I could: I am a Green-Village-Builder, restorer of African American place.
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