What does it look like when community wellness, environmental justice, and Black history converge on a Charlotte greenway? For the CoCoEco Initiative, it looks like a walking crew.  Launched by GirlTREK members Nakisa and Khrystle, the CoCoEco Walking Crew combines public health, greenspace access, neighborhood wellness, and environmental justice into one intentional stride. Their Charlotte Greenway Series creates space for residents to move together, build community, and explore how access to safe and connected greenspaces supports healthier people and healthier neighborhoods.

The crew curated a walk as part of the G4GC Convening, that included funders and nonprofit leaders centering girls of color in their work. Moving through Charlotte's Second Ward corridor, the walk became a reckoning with place, memory, and the communities that were built and taken from Charlotte’s Black population.

CoCoEco led convening members through some of Charlotte's most historically significant  places ensuring these histories were not silenced. The first stop was the Harvey B. Gantt Center, Charlotte's leading institution for African American art, history, and social change. As a beacon of cultural pride that anchors the neighborhood, walkers learned of the institution's root racing back to 1974, and its namesake Harvey B. Gantt, Charlotte’s first Black mayor and the first Black student admitted to Clemson University.

Walkers then moved on toward Romare Bearden Park, named for the celebrated artist whose work drew deeply from Black Southern life. The park sits near the footprint of the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, once a thriving, largely Black section of Charlotte that was demolished in the 1960s under the banner of urban renewal. This demolition took with it homes, businesses, churches, and the connective tissue of a self-sustaining community, that has been replaced with Brooklyn Village. Positioned as Charlotte's promise to Black residents to make amends for what was destroyed, this massive mixed-use project with shops, homes, and offices remains a promise unbuilt.

When Pam laced up her walking shoes and joined GirlTREK in 2016, she was simply looking after herself. She had no way of knowing that one small act of self-care would one day mean the difference between hunger and a warm meal for a 92-year-old neighbor.

Pam leads organizing for Caregivers at GirlTREK and is a proud resident of Montbello — a close-knit Denver neighborhood with deep roots and resilient people. For years, her walking crew moved through those familiar streets together, building the kind of trust that only comes from showing up for one another, week after week, walk after walk.

When the pandemic arrived — everything changed.

In the spring of 2020, as the Mayor's stay-at-home orders swept across the city, Pam looked around her neighborhood and saw something that broke her heart: Montbello's elders were stranded. Seniors who had spent decades building this community — suddenly couldn't board a bus or walk to a grocery store. They were going without fresh food. They were going without enough food.

Pam didn't wait for someone else to solve it. She rallied her walking crew, and together, they offered a "Food for Seniors" care initiative — going door to door, delivering fresh fruits, vegetables, and healthy supplemental food to the neighbors who needed it most.

What happened next left the crew breathless.

Within a few months, they began noticing something remarkable in the seniors they were serving. Better posture. Brighter eyes. Stronger strides. The elders who had once seemed diminished by isolation were standing taller, moving with more balance and endurance, greeting the crew with laughter and enthusiasm where there had once been quiet worry. Nourishment, it turned out, was about far more than food.

The walking crew couldn't stop there. What began as mobile deliveries for seniors facing food insecurity, blossomed into community care available in the Montbello community in the present day. The Montbello walking crew launched healthy cooking classes where generations and cultures gathered around the same table — and the elders became the teachers. Dishes rooted in China, Vietnam, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mexico filled the room with aroma and story and pride. Food became a bridge across cultures, a reclamation of dignity, a celebration of the lives these elders had lived.