Boston can boast about many things – top colleges, rich history and vibrant business. And now, it can add one more item to that list: an emerging local food economy.
That’s right, ever since the 1980s, the areas of Roxbury and Dorchester have been slowly developing their communities into burgeoning food hubs. With community land trusts, local kitchens and retailers, a waste-management co-op and others, Boston is achieving an integrated food economy.
Back in the eighties, residents banned together and formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, acquiring 60 acres of land in the middle of the Dudley neighborhood. Since then, the land has been used to build homes and start a community land trust consisting of parks, gardens, a town common, community center, charter school and a community greenhouse.
That greenhouse is leased to the Food Project, a nonprofit focused on youth development and urban agriculture. Half of the greenhouse is used for produce that is sold to cover the majority of the operating costs, while the other 50 percent is utilized by local residents and organizations.
Food Project works with more than 150 teens and thousands of volunteers to produce food that is sold at famers’ markets and community agriculture programs in order to raise money for hunger relief programs.
Additionally, since 2001, the Grow or Die campaign run by Boston’s youth has been turning vacant lots into raised-bed community gardens servicing more than 100 families.
And in 2009, City Growers entered the scene. Started by Glynn Lloyd (who also runs Roxbury catering company City Fresh Foods) because he wanted access to fresh, local food, the for-profit farming venture is one of the area’s firsts.
Lloyd hasn’t stopped there, as he recently founded the Urban Farming Institute and facilitated in the passing of Article 89, a commercial urban agriculture zoning ordinance. As a result, a groundbreaking was held last July for the Garrison –Trotter Farm, which sits on two lots that had been vacant since the 1980s.
Along with the programs, gardens and more processing business, retailers and restaurants are emerging that want to utilize the local food. Linking all of these organizations is that community’s first step toward a successful local food network.
And for Lloyd, coordination and cooperation is the key for the future.
“Many of us don’t come from conventional business backgrounds,” Lloyd tells YES! Magazine. “Innovation won’t just come from private sector, nonprofits, or government, but from all of them working together.”
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Tag: community gardens
Despite Adverse Weather Conditions and a Transient Population, a Garden Sprouts in a Desert
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While some find rolling hills and crystal clear lakes attractive, it’s an abandoned Las Vegas parking lot for others.
That’s the situation with Rosalind Brooks. Looking at the vacant lot across the interstate from Las Vegas’s moribund downtown, she saw the potential for something foreign in that area: a community garden.
Brooks has a degree in business, a master’s in education, has worked at various jobs and has two children, but from the moment she laid eyes on that lot, she knew this garden was her calling.
That vision came to fruition when the Vegas Roots Community Garden opened in March 2010 — becoming the first community garden in Las Vegas. Run entirely by volunteer labor, the garden covers an acre of land and produces organic herbs and vegetables as well as chickens. Most of the produce is either sold or donated to youth groups and senior centers.
The garden also boasts a demonstration permaculture garden run by the Greater Basin Permaculture. In this garden, artichokes, thyme, Echinacea, lettuce, sunflowers and pomegranates flourish. The garden isn’t just for the group though. Greater Basin Permaculture also hosts classes and weekly work parties to teach participants important gardening skills to keep the crops alive.
And while it hasn’t been difficult to keep the crops alive in the 115 degree Fahrenheit heat of Las Vegas, growing a supportive base in the area has been. Las Vegas isn’t a place where most people settle; rather it’s a place boasting a large turnover rate.
Because of that, many of the garden’s volunteers are from other places in the metro area. But this isn’t a discouraging factor for Brooks. The recent economic crisis has meant that more people are staying in the area.
Beyond that, though, the garden has served as an inspiration for others. Across the city, gardens are popping up in schools and churches, giving kids the access to healthy food, exercise, nature and job skills. In addition, there’s a growing farmer’s market scene.
For Brooks, all of the hard work has been completely worth it and her expectations for the future keep getting higher.
“I see the hand of God in every single thing we’ve done,” she told Grist.
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Neighborhood Blight Is No Match for These Pop-Up Gardens
Putting it bluntly, there’s nothing good about an abandoned lot. It collects litter and can serve as a congregating place where undesirable activity goes on.
Fortunately, in North Chicago, some vacant spaces are undergoing a makeover and sprouting some new and helpful additions.
Since 2010, resident Lamonda Joy has been transforming these lots into pop-up gardens, providing organic food to the growers.
Interestingly, Joy got her inspiration to create luscious green spaces from a vacant lot that she walked past every single day on her way home from work. After seeing a picture of a World War II victory garden in that same space, she had the idea to return the area to its former glory.
The Peterson Garden Project took root in 2010 and at the time, became the largest organic garden in Chicago and the first in a long line of pop-up gardens.
What separates Joy’s gardens from other community gardening projects? Hers are meant to only last for two to five years. (Hence the term pop-up.) The gardens will appear overnight and a few years later, disappear just as fast.
Their creation is very simple: When Joy spots an empty lot, she contacts the owner and asks to use the space for as long as possible. An agreement is signed with the owner, and the following day, the gardeners arrive with the 4’x8’ raised gardening beds.
The project only uses raised beds because the group is unsure what hazards lay in the city soil, and they do not want to risk infecting the produce. Further, the raised beds make it incredibly efficient to start and take down a garden. When a particular lot is no longer available, the beds are simply picked up and carried to the next spot.
In the four years since its inception, the project has grown extensively. This season alone, the Peterson Garden Project will be coordinating 4,000 gardeners in eight different lots across North Chicago. The gardens are open to everyone, and free classes are offered to beginners, as well monthly classes for experienced gardeners. Weekly, the group holds “in the garden” question-and-answer periods.
The majority of the food is consumed by the gardeners themselves, but five percent is donated to area food banks and nutrition programs through a group known as Grow2Give. The Peterson Garden Project is also working to make organic, sustainable food available for low-income families by providing scholarship donation plots.
Clearly, the Peterson Garden Project is transforming those vacant lots from eye sores into a valuable community asset.
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A Garden Grows in Camden
In the midst of abandoned lots in one of America’s most dangerous cities grows a beautiful oasis of fruits and vegetables.
The produce garden represents not only a food source for the residents of Camden, New Jersey (which is known for its high crime rate and drug use), but also a sign of renewal and recovery for the area’s children and families.
The year 2012 saw Camden named the most dangerous city in America, and times only got worse in 2012 when Camden lost its last central supermarket. Now, all that is left for food shopping is a grocery store that’s too far away for the city’s poor, car-less population and packaged food that can be purchased at the city’s bodegas. With access to fresh, healthy food so limited or nonexistent, it is no surprise that obesity is common.
However, not all is lost thanks to the introduction of community gardens. Across the city, they’re sprouting up in the abandoned lots sponsored by churches, neighborhood organizations, and private growers. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Public Health Initiatives reported in 2010 that Camden’s gardens were the fastest growing in the country. The 130 gardens in the city produced $2.3 million worth of food and fed 15 percent of the population.
Who is responsible for this change? The answer can be traced back to one man: Mike Devlin. Devlin came to Camden in the late 1970s and has since been trying to develop agriculture in the area. Under his guidance, the Camden City Garden Club was created in 1985. The organization provides support for the area by offering educational classes, materials, structural help, and food distribution. Under the club are a number of other organizations such as the Camden Children’s Garden, Camden Grows, the Food Security Council, and the Fresh Mobile Market.
Camden has been wrestling with violence and economic troubles since the late 1970s. Although those issues are still prevalent in the area, the community gardens provide an alternative life. Many students who work at the Camden Children’s Garden go on to attend college. While the gardens may not solve all of Camden’s problems, it provides a stepping stone for residents and a hope that change is possible.
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Bringing Bhutanese Village Life to Refugees in New Hampshire
Getting down and dirty in the garden offers a multitude of health benefits.
And now, a community garden in Concord, New Hampshire is helping Bhutanese refugees with homesickness by recreating the village atmosphere they miss.
Ghana Khatiwada, a translator fluent in Nepali and English who works as a cultural liasion for the garden, told Megan Doyle of the Concord Monitor, “To them, it’s like a home feeling to come here and work in a garden,” she said.
The Sycamore Field Community Garden charges only $15 for a plot each season, so even the most impoverished refugees can participate. Organizers give away free seedlings to the immigrants.
While all this sounds great, it isn’t problem free. Each year, there’s a giant waiting list for the 138 garden plots available; this season, 70 families entered a lottery for the four open slots.
The lucky winners of plots emerge from the growing season well-fed, with extra cash in their pockets. “We are saving a lot of money,” gardener Ghana Khatiwada told Doyle. “In the winter, we spent a lot of money on vegetables like tomatoes, okra, eggplants.”
Ideally, garden manager Cheryl Bourassa would expand the garden, but she’s limited due to the amount of available water. To increase the number of plots, the nonprofit, which relies on grants and donations for its funding, would have to dig a new well — at a cost of $15,000. So recently, they filmed a video of the bustling activity in the garden to feature on Faithify, a crowdfunding website that will launch next month. Lea Smith, who shot the video, told Doyle, “Maybe somebody in Idaho will be inspired to help refugee farmers in Concord, New Hampshire.”
It’s clear that the atmosphere in The Sycamore Field Community Gardens is worth sustaining. Bourassa told Doyle that in the summer when the plants are burgeoning and the gardeners are there to tend them, “It’s almost like a little social club. It’s this real sense of life in a village.”
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Read About the Nonprofit That Grows Not Just Food, But a Community, Too
What activity can decrease a low-income family’s dependence on food assistance, promote health, reduce crime, and bring people of different income and education levels together? Gardening can accomplish all this and more.
Since botanist and garden enthusiast Larry Stebbins responded to the lack of community gardens in Colorado Springs, Colorado by starting the nonprofit Pikes Peak Urban Gardens (PPUG) in 2007, hundreds of volunteers have become involved in creating plots in low-income neighborhoods and educating their new owners on how to tend them. “By teaching others how to [garden], you empower them to be more in control of their food supply,” Stebbins told J. Adrian Stanley of the Colorado Springs Independent.
Case in point: Stebbins said that one low-income family participating in the PPUG expanded the garden volunteers had helped them plant and were able to reduce using food stamps by 70 percent during the summer months when tomatoes, zucchinis, and other produce was abundant.
Another benefit to gardening? The nonprofit has learned over the years that when the plots are physically close together in proximity, not only is a feeling of community created, but also an atmosphere in which gardeners learn from and share with each other. Now it plants “pods” of gardens, such as the nine clustered gardens they established in a low-income neighborhood this year with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Colorado Home and Garden Show.
In addition to helping people plant their own gardens, Pikes Peak Urban Gardens has established two urban farms that grow produce for charities; some of the homeless people that benefit from the produce pitch in to tend those crops, alongside volunteers from all walks of life. Stebbins told Stanley that one year, a doctor and a man who lived in subsidized housing struck up a garden-based friendship. “People come in their dungarees,” he said. “You don’t know if they’re rich, poor or whatever. And it’s a great equalizer, and it’s a great way for people to come together.” After all, we’re all united in our quest for that perfect tomato.
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Thriving Gardens Now Grow in a Denver Food Desert
After graduating from the University of Denver in 2007, pals Joseph Teipel and Eric Kornacki headed south, to Guatemala where they participated in a service project.
Inspired by the work they did there, the two returned home to help poor communities here in the United States. Their goal is a lofty one: They want to foster self-sufficient communities nationwide that grow their own healthy food. But for now, they’re starting small by making a difference in one city.
In 2009, Teipel and Kornacki formed the non-profit, Re:Vision, and launched their first program, Re:Farm, to help low-income people living in a food desert in southwest Denver. Their first project included planting a school garden at Kepner Middle School, designing irrigated backyard gardens for seven families, teaching families how to grow their own food, and mentoring at-risk middle schoolers through gardening. In 2010, their work was rewarded with an $80,000 grant from the National Convergence Partnership to study how gardening can be used to prevent violence and implement programs. From there, they began hiring community promotoras to spread the word about healthy food and teach other people in their neighborhood how to garden.
Much like the gardens themselves, Re:Vision is growing. Last season, 200 families participated in the backyard garden program, producing 28,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. A hundred families are on a waiting list for a garden, and the organization hopes to meet that demand this year, with the help of a $50,000 Slow Money Entrepreneur of the Year award and a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
They’re also launching a program called “Dig it Forward,” through which people who want to help can hire Re:Vision workers to design and plant gardens. The proceeds from these garden sales will pay for free gardens in low-income people’s yards. Taipel told Helen Hu of North Denver Tribune, “It’s a way of thinking outside the box. We have a lot of expertise, and if people want to start gardens and help others, it’s a win-win.”
Patricia Grado, an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, serves as one of the promatoras, told Hu, “I’ve reaffirmed my understanding about how to grow our own food, about food sustainability, nutrition, and among other things, how to help the community with my knowledge.”
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An Oasis in One of America’s Largest Food Deserts: the Local Quick Mart
The Quick Mart on Williamsburg Road in Richmond, Va., is your typical corner store. It does a brisk business in cigarettes and newspapers, along with convenience foods, like Cheez-Its and potato chips. It’s located in the city’s Greater Fulton neighborhood, which means its customers are mostly low income. There is one thing that sets the Quick Mart apart from other shops, though: It’s the only place within a nearly two-mile radius where customers can buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
Since May 2013, the Quick Mart has been stocking a portable refrigerator with tomatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuces and other seasonal fruits and vegetables. Every week it receives a delivery from Tricycle Gardens, a local nonprofit whose mission is to grow healthy foods and get them on people’s plates in low-income Richmond neighborhoods. On a busy Monday afternoon last October, the Quick Mart fridge was empty, save for a couple of handfuls of okra and some collard greens.
“Everything’s selling,” says store owner Ayad Nasher, 26. “Whatever I got there in the cooler, they want it. I’ve been explaining to people that we have fresh vegetables now because we didn’t have it before, and they love it.”
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There are some 18.3 million Americans currently living in food deserts — low-income areas with limited access to a supermarket or other source of fresh food — which are more than a mile from a grocery store in urban areas, or more than 10 miles in rural communities, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. People who live in these areas are more likely to eat poor diets and to be at higher risk of becoming obese and developing chronic obesity-related diseases. Richmond is one of the most densely populated food deserts in the nation; many of its residents can’t afford a car or the bus fare necessary to reach a grocery store.
The problem with the food-desert epidemic is that there’s no clear solution — or at least not one that’s been adequately shown to work. Public health experts have been very good about accurately mapping the precise location of the country’s thousands of food deserts, but they haven’t been as successful in getting to the next step: identifying ways to shrink them. One obvious answer may be simply to build more grocery stores. In fact, in January, the House finally passed the farm bill, which included a provision for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative that will provide $125 million to fund the construction of healthy food retailers in underserved neighborhoods.
Improving food access helps. But recent research suggests that while building new grocery stores can increase people’s perceptions of healthy food availability in their community, it might not be enough to actually change their shopping behaviors. There are lots of reasons people shop and eat the way the way they do. It goes beyond mere access: They like buying their food from the same neighborhood store owner they’ve known for decades; and they like cooking and eating with their families and preserving their culinary traditions. They don’t particularly like it when outsiders drop in to wag their fingers and tell them to eat their fruits and vegetables.
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That may help to explain Tricycle Gardens’ success. Rather than building an invasive, new superstore, the nonprofit is wisely using the resources Richmond already has. Tricycle Gardens’ Get Fresh East End! initiative gets affordable, organic and delicious foods to low-income communities through existing channels — the Quick Mart and, about 2 miles northwest, the Clay Street Market. All the produce comes from Tricycle Gardens’ half-acre, high-yield urban farm in the nearby Manchester neighborhood. Opened in 2010, it produces 20,000 pounds of food a year. “There’s incredible flavor in locally grown food that hasn’t been trucked across countries or states,” says Tricycle Gardens’ executive director, Sally Schwitters. “One thing you can’t outsource is locally grown food.”
Tricycle’s program coordinator Claire Sadeghzadeh interacts directly with the corner store owners and personally delivers their produce twice weekly. On average, she drops off anywhere from $4 to $12 worth of fruits and vegetables per delivery at each store and constantly monitors which items are selling and which aren’t. She says Get Fresh East End! — which is supported in part by Virginia Community Capital, another nonprofit working to increase food access — plans to expand to eight additional stores by the end of 2014. “I think it helps dispel that myth that low-income families don’t eat healthy or that they don’t want healthy food,” Sadeghzadeh says. “And we know that they do. I think it’s superpowerful to see that all of our produce is pretty much sold out every week.”
Quick Mart’s Nasher, who has started cooking for himself using the produce at his store, says “it would be great” to see more shops in the area carrying fresh, locally grown food from the nonprofit. “I’m here to help the community,” says Nasher, who moved to the United States from Yemen in 2003. “To get fresh fruits and vegetables has been amazing.”
At the same time that it’s increasing healthy food access, Tricycle Gardens is also working hard to reconnect local growers with their buyers. People become more mindful of what they eat when they know where their food is coming from — even more so when they’re taught how to cook it properly. Tricycle Gardens offers various classes for community members, so they can learn how to prepare their produce — everything from bell peppers, onions and cucumbers to squash and eggplant — once it’s obtained. “The distribution is critical, but complementing that with education and outreach events — to show that preparing this great food can be easy and affordable, great fun and incredibly delicious — is where we know the changes that we hope to see can happen,” Schwitters says.
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One especially rewarding moment sticks out in her mind. Tricycle Gardens set up a stand at the Greater Fulton Community Health Fair last May, and offered local residents a fresh salad from the farm. A mother and son approached the stand; Schwitters handed the child a bowl. The salad was full of food that kids love to hate: raw kale and collard greens, topped with broccoli and carrots.
“Oh, he’s not going to eat that,” the mother said.
“Well, let me just hand it to him and if he doesn’t eat it, that’s fine. We’ll compost it and it’ll go back into our garden,” Schwitters said.
Schwitters says she turned away for a brief conversation with the boy’s mom, and when she turned back, the salad was gone. He wanted seconds. “We see this time and time again,” says Schwitters, whose grandfather was a farmer. “It’s very different eating freshly grown broccoli that has a crunch and a sweetness and a beauty to it, as opposed to that mush that comes out of a frozen bag.”
Tricycle Gardens, which has a full-time staff of just four and draws on a network of nearly 500 volunteers and interns, runs a year-round weekly farm stand and helps maintain five community gardens and three learning gardens, which provide ample opportunities for children at schools and community centers to connect with the food they eat. With its partners, the Bon Secours Richmond Health System and the Children’s Museum of Richmond, the nonprofit also runs two healing gardens, spaces for reflection and solitude. The food from the healing gardens further helps feed employees of the health system and museum.
“We want to share the magic of looking at a tiny seed and wondering how, with a little love and sunshine and a home in some beautifully composted soil, this could become something that ends up feeding you,” Schwitters says. “That connection lasts a lifetime.”
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Want to Teach Kids About Food? Make Them Grow Their Own.
In Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, community farms are giving students hands-on opportunities to learn about nutrition, biology and food production. Many of the city schools in the area have implemented school gardens, and teachers collaborate with farmers to expose students to agriculture on a larger scale. The educational programs embrace the valley’s agricultural heritage and get more local food into school cafeterias and students’ homes. Kids are not only learning to cultivate plants and understand life cycles, but also trying healthy foods they may not have eaten before. An added bonus: the experiential learning gets students physically active as they dig, weed, water and plant. Talk about a fresh idea.