William Brah of the Venture Development Center at UMASS Boston interviewed Jhana Senxian about the 260 Washington Street Project:
Jhana Senxian is the Founder and CEO of the Sustainability Guild, a direct action network of urban residents who re-imagine and redevelop their communities. Jhana is a social anthropologist and entrepreneur who hails from Boston’s Grove Hall community. She’s actively changing the systems which lead to social problems in the urban core.
She spent a year at the VDC developing her Vision-in-Action concept which has resulted in a partnership with TSNE, a nonprofit sector capacity builder with a pattern of putting its resources and experience behind shifting power and supporting social justice work. The co-development team joined forces to acquire and transform the warehouse building at 260 Washington Street into a 70,000 s.f. showcase of social enterprise. In addition to the building development, the plan includes the transition of a +42,000 s.f. urban wild into the Washington Street Food Forest. The green oasis and vibrant destination reflective of community needs and desires, is sure to shift the conversations around local economies, resilience and innovation.
Located just a five minute walk from the new Four Corners/Geneva MBTA station along the Fairmount/Indigo Corridor, the hope is that the building will serve not only as a catalyst for the revitalization of the Washington Street Corridor but also as a scalable and replicable model for community leadership, asset creation and investment that shifts paradigms of power, access and cross-sector partnership.
Read the full interview on the Venture Development Center’s website.