Dorchester is home to hundreds of community activists. You occasionally see stickers on cars that indicate their origins. Some are OFDs – Originally from Dorchester. Others, like me, are DBCs – Dorchester By Choice. They all care deeply about Dorchester.

One such DBC activist, Pat Cooke, died suddenly ten years ago and left a rich legacy that is improving the education of local youth on environmental and sustainability issues.

Pat came to Boston from Indiana in the early 1970s as a graduate student at the Harvard School of Design. He was smitten by Dorchester, enchanted by the many distinct neighborhoods, and disturbed by the loss of what he considered excellent housing stock that we call three-deckers. He created a nonprofit organization named Living in Dorchester (LID) to preserve and enhance three-family housing as an attractive option for residents of modest means.

In 1950, Boston’s population reached a high point of 801,000. By the 1970s, that number had dropped to around 550,000 residents. This decrease created excess housing stock that was viewed at the time as expendable. The result was that hundreds of three-deckers were abandoned, many of them burned down by arsonists.

Knowing that three-deckers were an excellent way to provide housing for families, and suspecting that Boston’s population would rise, Pat became a licensed contractor and began a 35-year effort to find and renovate derelict three-deckers. His rebuilding efforts resulted in housing for lower-income families. He often turned to community groups to help identify the families that would be chosen to rent or buy the newly renovated, well-constructed housing.

Pat understood the importance of building sustainably. He included high efficiency and renewable energy systems into his reconstruction efforts, and, as a landscape architect, he supported community gardens as part of community development. 

When he died suddenly in 2013, the board members of LID, Michael Gimbrere, and I had to decide what Pat would have wanted to do with the four three-deckers in LID’s portfolio. We agreed that he would have wanted the housing to be committed to low-income families and sold them well below market to programs that provide housing for homeless families. The proceeds from the sale of the properties were invested in a donor advised fund at the Boston Foundation named The Pat Cooke Fund.

The fund’s mission is to promote education around approaches to sustainability by, among other things, offering sustainable development and fellowships for K-12 teachers who want to incorporate teaching about our environment and sustainability into their curricula. Dozens of teacher fellowships have been awarded from the fund over the past few years. 

This year’s Pat Cooke Fellows are teachers at Boston Arts Academy, Boston Green Academy, the Epiphany School, and Codman Academy. The goal of their fellowship projects is to deepen their students’ understanding of the natural world and inspire them to work to sustain and improve the environment.

Examples of 2024 Pat Cooke Fellows’ projects include:

• Erica Wilson will travel to Central America to research “Passivhaus” architecture, which provides energy efficient housing suited to their regions. This information will result in expanding the Thermodynamics unit of the senior-level Engineering Physics course at Boston Green Academy.
• Maura Tighe Gattuso will interview leaders in the global theater and production community exploring and documenting how they are taking action on climate- related issues. She will use her findings to establish a Green Arts Initiative at Boston Arts Academy.

• Steve Joazard will do field studies in Costa Rica to learn about that country’s commitment to environmental stewardship. He will research and develop a six-week learning unit that will build on writing skills while exploring sustainability topics, including doing local environmental assessments by middle school students at the Epiphany School.

• Dave Kramer will travel to Columbia to learn how local schools infuse nature-based education to their marginalized urban youth. His goal is to bring ideas to Boston Green Academy on trauma-informed approaches to environmental education, and ways to connect city dwellers to nature.
Pat Cooke was a community activist who spent his adult life helping to make Dorchester and the world a better place. His efforts in Dorchester have continued through this fund, which seeks to create more opportunities for teachers and students to learn how to conserve our community and planet. 

For more information on the Pat Cooke Fund, go to patcookefund.com.

Bill Walczak is a Reporter columnist and a volunteer advisor to the Pat Cooke Fund.