Interview With Sharon Adams, President of the Walnut Way Conservation Corp.

“...to sustain an economically diverse and neighborly community through civic engagement, environmental stewardship, and economic enterprise.”


Sharon Adams reminds us that this is the mission of the Walnut Way Conservation Corp. In this video, we specifically asked her to discuss issues dealing with economic enterprise and the strategies that the community is using to redevelop their community. As you will learn, economic enterprise goes hand in hand with environmental stewardship as well as civic engagement. Their economic strategies are built around their effort to sustain a neighborly community by getting all of the community involved in their "sunshine market".

My mission in this project was to link the history of the neighborhood's failing economy with the current economic development. Sharon Adams briefly discusses what the community was like as she grew up. She then goes on to discuss the factors that played into the wipe out of the entrepreneurial spirit that had once existed in the community. Once Mrs. Adams returned to her home in the Walnut Way community in 1997, she was determined to regain that entrepreneurial spirit and sense of community that she had remembered as a child. The "sunshine market" appears to be the neighborhood's strongest effort to not only gain economic profit, but also the community profits from the opportunity to work together and make use of the empty land that was unfortunately cleared for the proposal of an expressway.