About Carol Ramos

We caught up with Carol Ramos after her presentation at the National Environmental Justice 
Conference. I'm Rachel Carr, a summer intern at the EPA, and I'm exploring what the Educate, Motivate, 
Innovate Initiative is and who the young leader involved are. You will hear excerpts from our 
conversation with Carol about who she is and how she developed her project. 
Carol Ramos is from The Planning School at The University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras. She is a 
graduate student studying planning and working with communities on developing health food access. 
Carol tells us about her path to the Educate, Motivate, Innovate Initiative and her motivation for her 
research. 
What inspired me to apply to the Educate, Motivate, Innovate Initiative the possibility to speak about 
the volunteer work that I was doing last year. 
Valuing an interdisciplinary approach to the projects she works on, she seeks to do more than look at 
food as an issue of agriculture and health. She sees her project as: producing healthy food thinking on a 
community scale. I truly believe that learning how to grow healthy food is a way to make it more 
accessible but it is also an act of resistance to urban sprawl and the loss of agriculture as a weight of 
economic development. 
Carol's approach to environmental justice comes in part from her experience growing up, living, and 
studying in Puerto Rico. Although I come from a specific context that is one of the colonies of the 
United States, there are many other contexts in the same US mainland that are very similar. 
Carol encourages the community based practices she developed in her work be translated into other 
projects.
It is important to interrelate with the communities to gain their trust. And for this we have to do 
other things, we need to be creative and play with the kids in the streets, we have to go to the local 
bars, we have to shop in their local markets. In this way we are going further than what we learn in 
universities. And in this way we are exceeding the academic requirements that every college, every 
university, require us. We need to go farther than that. 
Carol's work as young community leader and research serves as a model for the next generation 
Educate, Motivate, Innovate Initiative.