Interweaving With Sara E. Jablonski
Inspired by our Interweaving podcast, this is the first of a series of conversations with people doing social justice work in Buffalo, NY.
Sara E. Jablonski is a 4-H Team Educator in the Cornell Cooperative Extension Erie County. She develops 4-H Youth Development clubs in the Buffalo, NY, and Amherst, NY, areas. She helps young people find their spark! She is one of my colleagues at Cornell in Buffalo, and she was kind enough to share with Weave News the work she does in the community and the flowers that she admires in Buffalo.
The Work
Work history: Where do you work? How did you become involved in this type of work? How long have you been involved in this work? What inspired you to continue working for social change?
I have worked at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Erie County (CCE Erie) as a 4-H Educator since October 2013, so it’s about to be 10 years. Prior to my current role, I did Americorps with a small organization in Buffalo called Food For All which focused on community food access. Before Americorps, I served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala doing community food security work. My past work history has a lot to do with food, and in my current role with CCE Erie, I am pretty involved with food, but my main role is to provide opportunities to young people based on their interests.
In college, I was initially interested in conservation biology. However, upon studying abroad for a semester in Ecuador, I came to understand that most people are not to blame for environmental issues, even though the field of conservation biology often communicates messages that make people feel like the enemy against the environment. I shifted to wanting to focus on work that puts people first, or at the very least work that doesn’t frame poor people as part of the problem. Agriculture and community food systems were the areas where my interest in biology and my desire to help people intersected. I’ve been able to address these topics through my various professional roles, and I also studied community food systems through my masters at Michigan State University.
Work mission and vision: On what type of social problems do you work? Why do you think they are important? How do you educate the public about this issue? What are the desired outcomes of your work?
One social problem I address is adultism, which is treating young people as inferior to adults. This topic is complicated because adultism does not deny that young people are in earlier developmental stages than adults. But it does mean blaming young people for things that are not their fault and assuming they do not have the ability to make decisions for themselves. As a 4-H Educator, my goal is to provide positive youth development experiences for young people of all ages across Erie County. This often means navigating difficult decisions with adults about how to interact with young people. This also means exploring my own learned behaviors and biases to make sure I am not perpetuating unhelpful patterns in my interactions with young people.
In my 4-H programming, I work primarily with black and brown youth in the City of Buffalo. When most people think of 4-H, they think of raising animals. In Buffalo, my work is focused on civic engagement and helping young people address issues that directly impact their own lives. While civic engagement has been a part of 4-H for a long time, it is not as visible or popular.
The goals of my work are to help young people not only prepare themselves for future careers that will be rewarding to them, but also to support young people in working with their communities to make positive changes that will improve the future for themselves and their families.
Impacts of the work: How does your work respond to the needs of the community you serve? What tools and techniques do you use to incorporate community partners into the vision you have for the city?
In my work in 4-H in the City of Buffalo, as well as Lackawanna, we use the Youth Community Action model to train young people in the process of developing and implementing community projects. This work is very responsive in that it is about asking young people what issues are affecting their communities then working with them to plan something they would like to do to address the issue. More recently, our work has been focusing on addressing racism and health inequality. This targeted work has happened in part because young people have been talking a lot about these issues, especially racism.
Since 4-H does not have as long of a track record working in the City of Buffalo as other organizations, and because our programming is focused on community impact, we do most of our work in partnership. We partner with schools, including charter schools and Buffalo Public Schools, community organizations, and local government entities to accomplish our work. We connect to partners through stakeholder mapping when we are developing a community project. In the summer, we run a teen employment program that places teens in internships based on their career interests. In this way, teens are directly working with community partners through hands-on workforce training.
The Flowers
Flower appreciation: What is your favorite flower? Why is it your favorite?
My favorite flower is echinacea, or coneflower. I love this flower partly because it’s a perennial, which is important to me because it doesn’t need to be planted every year, and I don’t have that kind of time to devote to planting annuals every year. It’s also just lovely. I really love how coneflowers look in landscaping. They stand out to me as strong and resilient and beautiful. It’s wonderful that they come in many colors as well, but the ones who seem to do the best, at least in my garden, are the purple and pink ones.
Flower impacts: What impacts do flower cultivation, as well as citywide events like Garden Walk Buffalo where flower gardens are showcased, have on Buffalo, NY?
I am honestly not the biggest fan of flower cultivation. Where resources are scarce, I think it’s much more important to plant vegetables than flowers. If I had to choose between planting flowers and vegetables, I would choose vegetables. When I worked in the Peace Corps, most things that people grew were edible. At the same time, just because resources are scarce, nobody should be denied beauty.
Flowers used to feel really superfluous to me. Now I have flowers growing around my house. The primary reason for that is practical – because I live in an older home, I do not know what is in the soil (I have not tested it) so it feels safer to plant something non-edible on the edge of my home. But I am also starting to appreciate the beauty of flowers more. I feel like this is because I have become a homeowner. Now that I am settled and have the benefit of being able to see the flowers I planted come back every year, I have a reason to maintain a flower garden.
