Green Team Members Featured on KCUR 89.3 Podcast

For four years, Green Team members Esmeralda Zapata, Pickman Zapata, Melissa Eakright, and Olive Faulkner have been working to transform vacant lots into pocket parks that provide gathering space for NE KCK neighbors—and the birds and butterflies that also call our community home. Now, their efforts are being featured on the new KCUR podcast “Up from Dust,” which details innovative efforts to promote native species in the KC Metro.

The “Up from Dust” podcast from KCUR, Kansas’s City’s local National Public Radio station, focuses on efforts to promote biodiversity in urban and suburban communities across the KC Metro.

The podcast focuses on the Green Team’s vacant lot revitalization work in the Turtle Hill neighborhood. The Green Team has created new trails and native plant gardens in lots formerly overgrown with invasive species.

The benefits of these urban green space projects include mitigating the harmful effects of climate change, since urban green spaces bring down temperatures and provide stormwater retention that can reduce flooding. The native plants that the Green Team plants also contribute to greater biodiversity, such as the butterflies that are now more plentiful after the Green Team planted milkweed.

Green Team members Pickman Zapata, Esmeralda Zapata, Olive Faulkner, and Melissa Eakright show off a new shipment of native tree saplings that will be planted in NE KCK vacant lots.

According to Pickman Zapata, another benefit is the sense of pride that Green Team members and neighbors experience as the land is transformed. “It is so tiring,” Pickman says, but once you honestly take a step back when you’re done, it is the most refreshing, relieving…and just a feeling of achievement.”

To learn more about the Green Team’s work, you can contact Pickman at pzapata@northeastkck.org.