The Bronx has it going on. For real. If the latest you’ve heard about this pioneering New York City borough is Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake’s much anticipated Legends of the Summer concert at the legendary Yankee Stadium then you know a little something.

But maybe you know more. Maybe when you think of the borough you imagine high top fades, boom boxes and other nostalgic images that provided the landscape for melodies like “Hip hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hoppa ya don’t stop.” Maybe you think of the cacophony of neighborhoods bursting at that seams with people, children laughing, trains wailing, cars honking, bells of the ice cream truck and the whipping sound of a Puerto Rican flag above a storefront. You might imagine these sounds reverberating off of projects and bodegas, walls of graffiti, houses and basketball courts and schools. Welcome to my home.

Nestled in the heart of this cultural epicenter is Bronx Design and Construction Academy (BDCA). The school looks no different from any other school in the neighborhood–an amalgamation of manipulated stone and iron. But from an aerial view, the monochromatic variations of grey and brown are interrupted by a deeply vibrant green roof.  BDCA’s green roof was the vision of the Green Explosion Action Team to transform the way their school accessed healthy food and at the same time, build resiliency to climate change. The garden yields crops of garlic, carrots and strawberries; the structure of the green roof provides greater insulation to the building.  It’s the epitome of ACE’s work to educate young people and activate their creativity and imagination. And when you tap into your ability to redesign the world around you can’t stop doing it. Everything has new meaning. Your school can become the epicenter of a community-wide fresh food initiative, giving new meaning to the line, “it’s like a jungle sometimes”; your neighborhood playground can be the site of a carbon sink reintroduction project. Now you might commonly know this as planting trees, but not when envisioning new possibilities.

So, Green Explosion saw the possibility of their green roof to not only provide healthy food and make their school building more energy efficient, but serve as the foundation of new discoveries. Green Explosion installed a solar panel canopy over their green roof to investigate if the canopy would lower the roof’s temperature and purify run-off water. And it did. With the canopy, the roof was 3 degrees cooler.

Just like hip hop, Green Explosion’s work got massive attention. In January 2013, the action team traveled to Abu Dhabi to represent the U.S.A. in the Zayed Future Energy Prize competition where they came in second place. Now without vision, second place just doesn’t have swag. It’s like Vanilla Ice. Not quite a winner but not the biggest loser.  But ACE Ambassador Noel Cruz re-imagined the outcome of the competition when he said, “we didn’t lose, we just didn’t win the medal.” Drops mic.

Hip hop emerged as raw, authentic- say it like you mean it- social commentary. It spoke to the tension of no longer being comfortable with the world around you and harnessing your imagination and all your talents to create a solution despite bleak conditions that seem eternal. In Noel’s reflection on the competition, he wrote, “The United States needs to step it up when it comes to the cause towards sustainability. Seeing all these other countries making leaps towards sustainable ideas and efforts. Why can’t the United States make an effort toward sustainability? It disappoints me that my country is not making enough of an effort to turn towards more sustainable practice.”

Take a little time to reflect.  How are you going to disrupt the status quo? What seeds will you plant to reshape your school and community? What will be the tight beat, rhythm, rhyme, crowd pleaser and pulse of your story? In his verse on Kendrick Lamar’s Poetic Justice, Drakes spits, “When you figure out it’s all right here in the city, and you don’t run from where we come from, that sound like poetic justice.”