The website for Tanya Fields’ The BLK Projek describes her vision as seeking “to address food justice, public & mental health issues as they specifically relate to under-served women of color through culturally relevant education, beautification of public spaces, urban gardening and community programming.”

All true. But the high-minded rhetoric doesn’t quite capture the drama of the moment when Fields decided to engage in some direct-action urban guerrilla farming by cutting the lock on a gate to a vacant lot near her home in the South Bronx.

“It was Memorial Day, 2010,” she recalls. “We were giving out vegan hot dogs, and planting sunflowers, and cleaning up weeds.”

And then suddenly the owner of the lot, who hadn’t answered Fields’ calls for a year, showed up. And then the police got involved. And then Fields had to scramble to find the cash to pay for a new lock and repairs to the gate.

It’s not easy being a food justice activist in the South Bronx, says Fields, who was born and raised across the river in Harlem. It’s especially tricky when you are the mother of four and depending on food stamps to keep everyone fed.

“If my name was Lauren and I was from Wesleyan, and I was living in Brooklyn, there would be people coming out of the woodwork to help me,” she says wryly.

But she’s not complaining. And what else would you expect from a woman who had read The Autobiography of Malcolm X by age 10, and whose father raised her to believe that “if we saw something that we thought wasn’t right, then we should speak up and we should try to change those things”?

Fields didn’t realize exactly what wasn’t right in the Bronx, however, until her kids started having trouble breathing.

“I always say to people there was no epiphany,” she says. “My kids started to get sick. That was it, you know. Both of my daughters, by the time that they were a year old, they had already been hospitalized twice, always for something respiratory.”

Fields started look for answers. She joined up with another South Bronx activist, Wanda Salaman, the executive director of Mothers On The Move.

“Wanda helped me connect the dots,” says Fields. “Did you know that there were 32 open-air waste transport stations in the South Bronx? Did you know we have a water treatment facility, and that around the corner from that water treatment facility is the plant that processes 71 percent of the sludge of the city? Did you know that they have terrible practices in terms of how they handle that sludge? Did you know that the type of particulate matter that is prevalent in the air at 2:50 p.m. is the worst kind, the kind that gives kids asthma? “

“I just became ravenous. I started to read up on everything. I started finding out about the state of the South Bronx. I started finding out about all of these different things in my community, good and bad, that contributed to the lifestyle that I was having with my kids. And I started thinking about food.”

“I have a very special relationship with food,” says Fields. “I like it a lot.”

She chortles delightedly. “This was right before food exploded on the national landscape. So I feel a little bit like I’m a pioneer in my community. Because I was talking about food when everybody was like ‘Oh, that’s cute, Tanya, but you know, we’re talking about air quality right now.’”

She looked around her neighborhood, a classic food desert, and noticed that it was full of empty lots — 10, she says, in “a one mile radius.” She wondered why her neighbors weren’t growing their own food. Eventually, she found herself cutting that lock.

And she’d do it all over again, she says –”absolutely” — if it weren’t for the fact that the police have told her that they would arrest her for any repeat unauthorized farming escapades.

But that doesn’t mean the citizens of the South Bronx won’t be hearing more from her in the future.

“I have this big personality,” says Fields. “I am a big woman. I have strong opinions. Sometimes people value those opinions. Sometimes it sparks some very intense conversations. But I have a lot to offer. And I am all up for making noise.”

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

As a member of a crew of carpenters working for wealthy residents on the upper East Side of Manhattan in the late 1990s, Betsy MacLean got lessons in class consciousness and racial awareness from two directions at once. She had the least skills or experience of anyone in her crew, but as the only white person on a mostly black and Latino team she discovered that clients would frequently address her as if she were the boss. And then there was her real boss: a former labor organizer who had spent the 1980s making trips to Nicaragua in solidarity with the Sandinistas.

“He gave me my first book on Che,” says MacLean with a sharp laugh, as she explains how a one-time philosophy major from Ohio ended up devoting her life to improving the welfare of the mostly low-income, minority residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York. “His whole thing was we do all of this work in the city for rich people, and it’s gonna pay for us to go down to Cuba and work on the reconstruction of Old Havana. That was the dream.”

MacLean followed that dream, and soon found herself working in the “super-marginalized” outskirts of Havana with “micro-brigades” of all-women construction crews. Soon she was organizing her own groups of Americans for regular trips to Cuba to help build urban agriculture projects. After completing a dual masters in international affairs and urban planning at Columbia, she decided to employ some of the lessons she had learned down south in East New York.

Today, as the community development director for the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, MacLean has helped organize the construction of new schools, green affordable housing, and, soon, a collectively operated chicken farm. And she is uniquely positioned to explore a sometimes touchy subject — the intersection of environmental awareness and class.

Being green, after all, can sometimes be seen as an upper-class affectation. The rich carefully sort their cans and bottles for recycling, hoping to lower their carbon footprint, while the poor poach those bottles from the curb to collect the cash deposit.

But MacLean says it really hasn’t been that difficult in East New York to convince residents that going green makes sense.

“It’s not a hard sell, to say, do you want to save money on your energy bills? Everyone gets the energy efficiency piece — they recognize that right away: ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it now, let’s do it yesterday.’ I think they also get the piece that connects to their health: how leaky roofs lead to mold and mildew in the basement which then leads to poor indoor air quality which then leads to higher than average asthma rates in our neighborhood. People get that where they are living has a direct impact on both their wallets and their health. I think the harder piece is then making the connection to the carbon footprint of our neighborhood.”

But there’s no problem whatsoever making the case for fresh, organic, locally produced food, or getting community support to help build an organic chicken farm in the city. The typical East New York resident is a bit more familiar with farm animals than your average Williamsburg hipster.

“Our community is largely recent immigrants from Latin America,” says MacLean. “And what we find is a lot of folks from the neighborhood have agricultural experience in their recent history. They are accustomed to eating fresh food, and not accustomed to the weird American way of eating. And so people are just desperate for healthy affordable food for their families. We found that when we built our school 10 years ago, from the very beginning parents were insisting on a cafeteria and kitchen that could provide healthy delicious culturally appropriate food that was fresh and not microwaved.”

“And all that goes back to the public health concept: community development as public health. If people are eating better, are warmer in their homes, if there’s less contaminants in their homes, then they are healthier and they are spending less money at the doctor or on medicine. It’s another way to reduce unnecessary costs and make people happier.”

Sustainability, says MacLean, has to start with real improvements in people’s immediate lives.

“If it is just about saving the polar bears, you miss the boat. I mean, I love the polar bears as much as anybody, but it just doesn’t resonate in East New York. It is not nearly as relevant to folks as ‘Let’s save you some money, and make sure that you and your kids are healthy.’”

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

In 2012, this is how Brooklyn rolls: On an early spring evening in March, 60-70 people gathered at the Brooklyn Brewery to hear a talk about what to do about sewage overflow into the notoriously polluted Newtown Creek. Urban planner Kate Zidar, the executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, recalled the meeting as the “nerdiest event you can imagine.”

“The first speaker went through reams of water quality data,” says Zidar, “and then there was me talking about a really obscure planning process. And it was packed.”

These days, it seems like you can hardly go one subway stop on the F train without slamming into yet another Brooklyn activist determined to turn one of the most metropolitan regions in the world into a clean, green, ecologically sustainable wonderland. Kate Zidar is a perfect example.

A one-time biologist, Zidar had an epiphany in Ecuador a decade ago while studying carabid beetles, a carnivorous rain forest insect.

“The typical conservation biology story is that you seek out these wild spaces and study them with this idea of needing to save them — save the rainforest or save the whales or whatever,” says Zidar. “But I found myself more observant of the fact that in these wild spaces there were humans who were struggling with their basic needs like food, shelter and employment, and how that impacted the ecosystem. And that’s how I got interested in urban planning.”

Zidar moved to New York, got a master’s degree in urban planning from the Pratt Institute, and speedily coined a new term in the title of her master’s thesis: “The Citizen’s Guide to the Sewershed.“

The sewershed is the urban watershed, explains Zidar, who is convinced that not everyone understands that when storm runoff floods into the sewers in New York, it overloads the system and sends raw untreated sewage directly into local waterways — a phenomenon known technically as combined sewer overflows, or CSO.

“There’s a huge gap between the way the sewer system chronically malfunctions and the public’s perception of that problem — and their place in that process,” says Zidar, who believes “users of infrastructure can be conscripted to help that infrastructure function better if they only knew what their connection was.”

Today’s sewer overflow outbursts are hardly the only pollution problems to have pummeled Newtown Creek over the years. The creek, says Zidar, served as an open sewer for the fuel industry dating all the way back to the days of whale oil — the early oilman Charles Pratt (founder of the Pratt Institute) started his first kerosene factory in Brooklyn.

“The bone boilers, the renderers, and the early waste industry were all here,” says Zidar, who notes that the sediment in Newtown Creek still contains pollutants that date back many decades. “So it’s got all this historic stuff going on, plus these kind of ongoing impairments.”

“And now people want to kayak,” she says. “It’s like this land of total juxtaposition, where we have he heaviest industry left in New York City, and then you have the North Brooklyn boat club.”

At the Newtown Creek Alliance, Zidar’s job is to help coordinate how to best spend the flow of federal, state, and city money available to mitigate the pollution problems. One key goal is creating more “green infrastructure”: vegetated areas that help filter pollutants and restore the region’s natural hydrology.

Another goal: Just getting the word out on how the major metropolitan ecosystem works. So far, Zidar seems to be making an impact.

“Whenever I give a talk, I will take a pop quiz at the beginning and ask, ‘If I say CSO, how many people know what I am talking about?’ I was at a talk last night, and almost 80 percent of the people there raised their hand.”

“It was like Revenge of the Nerds.”

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

Life as a skate punk growing up in the northern Wisconsin town of Minocqua wasn’t always easy, recalls Erick Boustead.

“We would always be getting kicked out of places while we were skateboarding,” he says. “We didn’t act out too much in school, but there was always a stigma associated with our music and skateboarding.”

“So we decided to organize.”

Boustead and his friends began a series of local music festivals and ended up raising $1,000 — enough to get a skate park built. The experience, says Boustead, “laid a foundation for seeing what is possible if you put a lot of energy into something, and try to put a positive spin on something that is unrightfully stigmatized.”

Boustead has been building on this foundation ever since as an environmental activist, events organizer, and co-founder of a media production company dedicated to helping nonprofit advocacy groups communicate their messages.

The son of a psychotherapist and a nurse who worked providing health care at the nearby Lac du Flambeau Indian reservation, Boustead grew up with a strong orientation towards helping other people. But from very early on he was also a musician, a drummer who listened carefully to politically oriented punk bands like Propagandhi and Good Riddance. A sustained effort to combine those two passions — arts and activism — is the theme of Erick Boustead’s evolving career.

“From a young age I was influenced by how art could communicate things that words were maybe not so good at,” says Boustead. “I definitely communicate better through music and art than words. So I feel that I can maybe help move things forward by creating spaces where people will be moved on an emotional or physical level.”

As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, Boustead managed to win the prestigious Udall Scholarship for his “commitment to environmental services.” At the same time, he and a group of similarly minded students founded Substance, a nonprofit booking and events management company that specialized in putting together politically minded music festivals in which activists from various realms — environmental justice, social justice, indigenous people’s rights — could network together.

Activism might seem an unusual pursuit for a business school student. But it makes sense in terms of the purposeful, get-under-your-skin agitation that’s fundamental to punk music. Going to business school — “the center of the Death Star,” jokes Boustead — ensured that Boustead would never become complacent.

“I don’t ever want to feel like I’m too comfortable,” says Boustead. “I have a fear of getting stagnant. If there is comfort then work isn’t being done.”

One of the highlights of his college years illustrates his point. When the Republican National Convention came to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in 2008, Substance organized a music festival on the lawn in front of the state capitol building, and invited the band Rage Against The Machine as a surprise guest. The state police were not amused, and pulled power for the festival — at which point Rage Against The Machine grabbed a megaphone and performed an a cappella concert in the middle of the audience.

“It was a perfect ending to what we had put months of work into,” remembers Boustead.

Substance continued organizing national tours and events for a few years beyond Boustead’s college days, but eventually he felt it was time to try something new. Along with another Substance veteran, he started a nonprofit venture, Line Break Media — a video production and online media consulting outfit dedicated to helping other socially activist groups get their message out.

“A lot of environmental justice organizations,” says Boustead, “are shut out of funding pools and don’t have the capacity to create multimedia productions or communicate the work that they were doing. And they also don’t necessarily network with other groups working on social justice. By doing that kind of work for them, we can open up space for them to start thinking about organizing in a much broader way.”

The name “line break” came from a vision Boustead had of a fish breaking the line cast by a fisherman, and thus “breaking free of the dominant culture.” But he soon realized that there were multiple overlapping meanings — for example, it suggests a poetic device, a “strategic line separation to emphasize some type of emotion of thought.”

“Then I realized that it was also an HTML code. Then we knew we would have the nerds to back us as well, so it was perfect.”

Bringing punk rockers and nerds together? Maybe not such a bad plan for trying to change the world.

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

There is dirt underneath Max Cadji’s fingernails seven days a week, and that’s exactly how he likes it. Whether he’s spending the day sifting worm compost in his job managing an urban farm for Oakland, Calif.’s People’s Grocery, or helping to set up a community garden through Phat Beets Produce, a “food justice collective” he co-founded, Cadji is outdoors, every day, pouring his “sweat equity” into projects he believes in.

He’d be doing the same work, he says, whether or not his job at People’s Grocery was paying his bills. “This is a movement,” says Cadji, “and when you’re doing movement-building, there is no disconnection between your free time and your work time. If I stopped getting paid, right now, I have money saved, and I’d continue doing the work until another means came along. It’s just basically what I think about all day and what I talk about all day — there is no need for me to make time for it because there is no differentiation between work and pleasure.”

The way Cadji sees it, there’s also not much difference between the southern tip of Madagascar and the flatlands of West Oakland. In both cases, the indigenous locals are at the untender mercies of a global food system that doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

In Madagascar, where Cadji spent three years in the Peace Corps working on a project to reintroduce sorghum, Western aid organizations were pushing non-traditional corn and other imported food items that made it impossible for local farmers to sell their own produce profitably. Meanwhile, in West Oakland, finding the capital to invest in a grocery store specializing in locally grown, healthy food is an uphill battle, but if you need a liquor store or fast food joint, there’s one on practically every corner.

“In Madagascar, I would see a family scooping peas out of a bag that was sent by the World Food Program as a gift from the United States,” says Cadji, “and at the same time I would see farmers bringing their fresh peas from the countryside, and they weren’t able to compete with the food that was being dumped on the local market. I saw the people I was working with suffer at the hands of my own government, and it really clicked for me that everyone knows how to produce food but there’s a lot of politics that is keeping people hungry. So that’s how I became introduced to the idea of food sovereignty: local people having the ability to control their own food systems, free from outside organizations, free from government, free from NGOs and the world market.”

“I really wanted to work on creating equitable food systems,” adds Cadji, “that figured out a way to bring really small farmers, and local farmers of color, into a community that reflects them, a community that is often left out of what we call the good food movement or the slow food movement.”

Cadji grew up in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, “in a very suburban atmosphere, so I really didn’t get much connection to urban food production, greenery, or landscaping.” After getting a degree in environmental horticulture at the University of California-Davis and doing his Peace Corps stint, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, with its hotbed of food justice activism and urban gardening initiatives.

But the profusion of socially minded nonprofits carries its own problems. Everybody is running after the same grant money, says Cadji, and too much of that money ends up paying cushy salaries to management positions, rather than directly helping the residents of the communities that the nonprofits are ostensibly targeting. At Phat Beets, Cadji and his fellow volunteers are attempting to do an end-run around this problem by doing the backend work — payroll, insurance, website design, and so forth — for free while paying a decent living wage to the workers who are actually digging gardens, delivering produce, and keeping the earthworms happy.

“We wanted to see what happens if you do something totally different, and create a structure where you put the power back in the hands of the people who are affected by a problem, and make sure that they get paid first.”

Ultimately, Cadji hopes to escape the chains of what he calls the “philanthro-pimp” model of grant-funded nonprofits and create self-sustaining businesses tied to food production. His work raising worms at People’s Grocery is one example. Vermiculture is taking off all over the Bay Area, he says; right now, demand for worms is far outpacing supply.

“I can’t keep up,” he laments. But a listener can hear between the lines: That’s a good problem to have, and all the more reason to get some more dirt under his fingernails. Local worms, local compost, local farming — it all adds up, eventually, to “liberation from the nonprofit industrial complex” and healthier food for everyone.

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

Most visionary startup entrepreneurs who aim to leverage the power of the internet to achieve progressive social change content themselves with trying to solve just one big problem. But Tim Whitley, the founder of COTAP.org — Carbon Offsets To Alleviate Poverty — is going double or nothing. His goal is to tackle climate change and the worst poverty in the world, simultaneously.

The scheme is simple in concept, if a bit gnarly to work out, technically. Individuals use the COTAP platform to buy carbon offsets. COTAP uses that money to pay some of the poorest people in the world to plant trees as part of carefully monitored agro-forestry projects. The trees, eventually, account for the carbon dioxide emission reductions. The model is similar to that employed by the microfinance lender Kiva.org, except that instead of aggregating funds to make loans directly to the specific people a lender chooses, COTAP aggregates funds to pay wages to people whose labor helps combat the challenge of climate change.

Whitley, who is based in Oakland, Calif., embraces the Kiva comparison. He’d love to have people refer to COTAP as the Kiva of emissions reductions. And even though the site only launched in September 2011, he jokes that maybe some day it will be Kiva that will be dubbed “the COTAP of loans.”

By 2015, says Whitley in a soft-spoken Virginia drawl, “I think I can get a quarter-million offsetters, and I think I can be doing $50 million a year. With at least half of that going to the poorest people in the world.”

Whitley acknowledges that for many environmental groups, carbon offsets have a bad name, particularly in the context of agro-forestry projects in the developing world. Under the cover of theoretically reducing carbon dioxide emissions, for example, a monoculture eucalyptus plantation that displaces indigenous residents of the rainforest can wreak enormous social and environmental damage. Too often, says Whitley, people “treat forestry in least developed countries as just another opportunity for resource extraction.”

“There needs to be an entity that views that traditional capitalist approach angrily, but calmly,” says Whitley, who cites his background as a compliance officer at the Sierra Club and the California Affordable Housing Initiatives as giving him precisely the kind of skills necessary to make a project like COTAP work. Projects need to be vetted. Donors need to be sure their money is going where it is supposed to go. Emissions reductions need to be proven.

“I’ve got a bit of bird-dog in me,” says Whitley, alluding to the determined focus typical of the popular hunting breed. “COTAP’s goals might seem all very nice and flowery, but I view it very much as a compliance game. You can lead with human impact stories and it is intellectually interesting and meaningful and all that. But it is going to take a fairly sophisticated back-end platform, and a lot of reporting and operations and structure, to make it work.”

Some might argue that attempting to tackle both climate change and poverty is akin to Don Quixote simultaneously tilting at a whole field full of windmills. But it’s precisely the combination of goals, argues Whitley, that will be the key to his project’s success.

One of the big drawbacks to forestry-related carbon offset programs is that tallying up the benefits, in the form of actual carbon reductions, is painfully slow. Trees, after all, take a long time to grow. Donors lose patience or look for quicker fixes. But when you go after two birds at once with one crowd-sourced stone (and a relentless bird-dog), you double the incentive to participate. You create, as Whitley puts it, the chance to do “wicked cool business stuff for good.”

Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.

It doesn’t take Corey Rennell more than a few staccato sentences to explain why, as a kid growing up in Alaska, he first started taking his food seriously.

“My mom was a huge hippie and only fed me natural food. My dad was a hunter. I watched Bambi when I was 7, and then shortly after, my dad killed a deer and served venison as my first taste of red meat. I was confused as to what it was. He said it was deer — baby deer. I had a meltdown and became a vegetarian.”

Today, after some detours that would defy the imagination of even the most baroque novelist — body builder, mountaineer, reality TV show contestant, Harvard graduate — the 26-year-old Rennell is the founder and owner of Core Foods, a San Francisco-headquartered food company that makes what are perhaps best described as ultra-natural energy bars.

Rennell’s “Core Meals” are so natural, in fact, that you won’t be able to find them on the same shelf with the Clif Bars or the Power Bars. These mixtures of nuts and fruit and other natural ingredients — no flour, no sweeteners, no oils — are perishable; they must be refrigerated.

“No bar that you ever eat of mine is ever a month from when I made it,” says Rennell, who is convinced that freshness is critical to maximizing the nutritional benefits from food.

That may not be the most earthshaking theory ever propounded by a Bay Area food activist, but Rennell has pushed his convictions further than most. He isn’t just trying to provide an alternative energy bar; he wants to shake up the whole for-profit food business.

Rennell believes that the economic incentives that put a priority on what he calls “shelf-stable” food have created a nutritional catastrophe. The necessity of loading up food with additives and preservatives and sweeteners all hinges on being able to keep that food hanging around as long possible before it must be sold.

“People aren’t eating fresh fruits and vegetables because we’ve tied up food with profit,” says Rennell. “Food is a business, and for businesses there is nothing worse than a perishable inventory. Your profit margin for an entire year can evaporate overnight if a cooler goes out. So grocery stores prioritize shelf-stable food, which means that all the advertising budget for food goes to shelf-stable food, and the only access consumers have is shelf-stable food.”

Core Foods operates on a unique model. Executive salaries are capped, and all profits get poured back into the business.

“At the end of every year, we don’t take a profit on the food,” says Rennell. “We either lower the price to the consumer or we increase the quality of the ingredients to match the profit that we have as a company. Or we do additional things like increase the sustainability of our packaging or make our employees happier.”

“It was really important to me that we didn’t reconnect food with profit,” adds Rennell. “Because otherwise there is an incentive to lower the quality of the ingredients in the food because it increases the profit margin. And that is a very bad incentive for a healthy food system.”

Rennell’s Core Meal recipes are based on insights he learned while competing in Last Man Standing — a BBC-Discovery Channel joint venture reality TV show that plopped six extreme athletes into the midst of 12 “primitive” tribes all around the world. At the time, Rennell was the president of the Harvard Ski Club and had recently participated in a mountaineering expedition to Kyrgyzstan. He took his nutrition very seriously — and he needed to, in order to survive the rigors of Last Man Standing. But his home-brewed mixtures of raw nuts, whole oats, and whey protein “tasted awful.”

“As I traveled to the different tribes,” he explains, “I got some of them to help me with recipe creation. So actually each one of our bars is inspired loosely by recipes that are traditionally based, that feature the traditional flavors of each region.”

And there you have it: a reality-show contestant who takes his nutritional cues from the indigenous inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and India’s Nagaland plans to overthrow the for-profit model of the food industry while helping us all live healthier lives.

It’s hard not to root for the guy.

In her backyard in Nashville, Tenn., Trazana Staples is growing turnip greens, mustard, kale, and two kinds of garlic (white and Siberian). “That’s the winter garden,” she says, with a tone of pleased satisfaction.

Her vegetable patch isn’t just a good source of produce. For Staples, it’s a daily reminder that profound personal change is possible.

Ten years ago, says Staples, her idea of “eating healthy” was to choose the chicken sandwich instead of the burger at McDonald’s. And it wasn’t working. Only 5 feet 4 inches, Staples weighed 325 pounds and suffered from a host of fitness-related medical problems. Before she turned 40, she’d already had her gallbladder removed and had a hysterectomy. Her doctor was warning her “that I had to decide whether I was going to live or die.”

She began trying to stick to a diet, but after losing weight, she’d quickly gain it back. “I was like a yo-yo,” she recalls, ruefully.

Then, one day in 2007, she went to a local theater that specialized in independent films and saw Food, Inc., the documentary on the dark side of the industrial food system.

“That movie totally changed my everything,” remembers Staples. “I saw how healthy food is connected to the environment — there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And from that point on, I got involved.”

“I started learning how to blend and prepare my food. I began eating a lot of raw foods, fruits and vegetables, healthy food, tasty food. One of the challenges is to maintain our culture in natural foods, and I found that I can do that. I can keep my greens, and prepare them in a healthy way and they still taste good, and I can prepare my cornbread without the eggs, without the butter, and without the milk, and still have my soul food meal.”

Staples not only managed to change her eating habits once and for all (she has lost 120 pounds, and counting); she also remade herself into a crusader for healthy, sustainable food in her own community. She founded Another Avenue Cultural Resource Center to spread the new gospel and joined a half-dozen local progressive advocacy organizations.

The deck is still stacked against her. North Nashville, she says, is home to the largest “food desert” in Davidson County — a vast region where the only outlets for residents to buy groceries are corner stores that are more likely to sell fried potato wedges than bananas or apples. Even worse, notes Staples’ business partner, Bryan Trotter, some of the stores within driving distance that do sell organic food don’t accept food stamps for their produce. That places low income people who want to upgrade their diets in a double bind. To top it all off, for the last two years, Staples was pushing her healthy eating agenda with the help of a grant from the Tennessee Alliance for Progress — but when that group lost its funding, she lost hers.

But there’s no defeating Trazana Staples. She still intends, eventually, to turn the Another Avenue Cultural Resource Center into a natural foods store. She and Trotter have set plans in motion to create what they call a “Village of Industry” — a network of cooperative businesses based on sustainability that will provide sorely needed green jobs in an economically depressed area. In January, she kicked off Fruits Over French Fries, a new program targeting childhood obesity.

“I had to get a full-time job to keep the ship afloat until we get more funds,” acknowledges Staples. “We do have some people that give donations, or they come and do some physical labor; building garden beds or the compost bin or planting and composting, and all of that makes a difference, little by little. Rome wasn’t built in a day — these things take time. We have to change the mindset, and the best way to do that is for people to actually see you living it, doing it and applying those principles in your life. “

For Ximena Prugue, being “young and naïve” is a strength, not a weakness.

“It makes you that much more powerful,” says the 21-year-old. “You don’t have all those years of experience deterring you from thinking that you can do something.”

To support this thesis, Prugue offers herself up as Exhibit A. Born and raised in Miami, Fla., the daughter of Peruvian immigrants, she had no idea what she was getting herself into when she decided to attempt to alleviate “energy poverty” in rural India by distributing solar-powered flashlights.

She didn’t know about the hassles involved in setting up a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, or how Indian customs officers would react to a girl whose luggage was stuffed with $3,000 worth of lights. She didn’t know how difficult it would be to fundraise, or make connections with on-the-ground aid workers in India who didn’t understand why an American teenager was badgering them. She underestimated the difficulties inherent in simultaneously holding down a part-time job, attending full-time community college, and running her own nonprofit. Perhaps most daunting of all, she knew nothing whatsoever about India.

Before her first visit, she says, “I literally had not even eaten Indian food. I hadn’t even seen Slumdog Millionaire.“

All she knew, she says, is she wanted to “make a difference.”

By the time she was a 19-year-old studying mechanical engineering at a community college in Miami, she already boasted a resume filled with socially meaningful work. In high school, she made a documentary about homeless sex offenders living under a bridge in southern Miami. She also helped raise money to support the construction of tilapia farms in Haiti. But she was looking for a project that would go beyond just fundraising — something that she could sink her teeth into.

“I’ve always been into art and design,” she recalls, “so I read a lot of design blogs and I stumbled across this article about the world’s most affordable solar-powered light.”

She proposed to one of her professors that the lights might be useful in Haiti. He told her to do some more research and encouraged her to apply for a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative University, a three-day conference that brings together thousands of young people interested in doing progressive work.

The conference was a life-changing event.

“There were people that were my age who already had their 501(c)(3) status,” recalls Prugue. “That had already had gone to all these different places and done amazing things. I was just like, wow, I have absolutely no excuse to say, ‘Well, oh well, I’m young. Oh well, I still have school.’ There was absolutely no excuse for me to not be doing something.”

She ultimately decided that Haiti didn’t have a big access-to-cheap-energy problem. Rural India, she determined, was where conditions were worst — where the lack of electricity was a major obstacle blocking people’s escape from deep poverty. She won a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative, built a website, set up Giving the Green Light as a nonprofit, and started emailing. A year and a half later, she was headed to India with her bag of lights. And now she knows exactly what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

“I am studying mechanical engineering,” says Prugue, “because I want to be the type of engineer that designs products that you can implement into developing countries to solve all sorts of problems.”

Looking back, Prugue doesn’t downplay the difficulties she faced.

“It doesn’t come easy. It definitely doesn’t come easy,” she says. “But if you work hard and you are really doing it with genuine good intentions — you’re not doing it because you just want to put it on your resume and get into a good college — it will come. It will happen. I believe in positive energy, and that that energy will come back to you, and all the karma will work out. And I really hope that other young people try to change the world too, because I feel that that is where the change is going to come from.”

Call it the bright side of globalization: progressive solutions midwifed by transnational interconnections. From her office in Berkeley, Calif., Andree Sosler, executive director of the Darfur Stoves Project, coordinates the distribution of cheap, clean, super fuel-efficient cooking stoves to women in the Darfur region of Sudan. Designed by Berkeley scientists, partially manufactured in Mumbai, India, and assembled in Sudan, the stoves vastly reduce the amount of time and money Sudanese women have to spend obtaining firewood and cooking food.

Dubbed “the five minute stove” by a group of Darfuri women Sosler helped train to market the device, the stoves are carefully calibrated to fit local environmental conditions and traditional cooking methods. As part of the research and development process, a team led by Ashok Gadgil, the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, made sure that users of the stove would be able to successfully cook traditional Darfuri meals such as assida, a sticky dough topped with fried onion, meats, and spices.

Sosler remembers showing some women in Darfur who had used the stoves a short video depicting the research process.

“These women were just astounded to see that there were women across the world testing these stoves, for us,” says Sosler. “One of the women almost started crying when she saw these pictures of Berkeley college students making assida. At that moment both the woman I was talking to and I felt the same feeling: This is amazing. We are bridging these huge gaps, taking world-class science down to one of the most unfortunate situations in the world.”

The Darfur Stoves Project is the first initiative of the Technology Innovation for Sustainable Societies, a nonprofit founded by Gadgil linking research institutions, nonprofits, and local distributors to promote progressive technological solutions to entrenched poverty and degraded environments. It’s a job that Sosler has been pointed directly at ever since she was a junior at Brown University, when she spent a semester in Cameroon.

After Cameroon, says Sosler, “I knew I wanted to have a career in economic development, most likely focused on Africa.” In the decade that followed she worked for Trickle Up, a microfinance organization, on projects in Benin, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Uganda, obtained an MBA from Wharton, and did a stint as a consultant to the government of Rwanda, focusing on the goal of improving tea exports.

But her experience working for Trickle Up and seeing the way many nonprofits operated in Africa left her feeling a big piece was missing from the aid game.

“There just wasn’t much core operating support for the local organizations,” says Sosler. “I met so many amazing grass roots organizations, and local activists, and just really motivated people who were sacrificing so much to help their communities, but I felt really frustrated with the lack of tools I had at the time to help them build their own capacity to solve their problems.”

At the Darfur Stoves Project, Sosler helps train the trainers who teach Darfuri women how to use the stoves, builds consensus between the scientists at Berkeley and the big nonprofits on the ground in Darfur, and hammers out the details of the supply chain that translates ideas in California to cleaner, faster-working, fuel-saving stoves in Darfur. The long-range plan is to translate the lessons learned in Darfur to deployment of other technologies elsewhere.

“Our role is to be project managers,” says Sosler, “and help make sure that the research and development that is done is demand-driven based on what is needed by people in developing countries, and to foster the relationships between researchers and the local people, and to help create sustainable mechanisms by which the technologies can be disseminated in an ongoing way without indefinite aid.”

If there’s a touch of Silicon Valley venture-capital pragmatism leaking through Sosler’s mindset, that’s not necessarily an accident. One of the structural problems that has plagued aid projects in the developing world in the past was an unwillingness to let donors know when projects weren’t working, for fear of losing funding. But that’s changing.

“I see a lot of Silicon Valley funding coming into this field and I think that because of that influence, people are really much more open now to saying we’re going to try three different things and we’ll do the one that works. I think there is an opening up of dialogue and transparency around the field, and an understanding that there isn’t one magic bullet solution. A lot of small solutions are gaining ground, and honestly that is probably the way that we are going to make large-scale change in the future.”