Community Gardening Not many state governments have a person whose only job is to assist community gardeners. With the growing interest in urban food production, most states should. Rosemary Menninger, the state Community Gardens Coordinator, is helping garden organizers tap into state resources which they might not otherwise know about. She will be writing a bi-monthly newsletter, ·california Green, which will keep garden organizers informed about where money can be found, where institutional support might be, and what is new at the state and local levels. Rosemary's report, titled Community Gardening in California and reviewed in the October RAIN, wilrbe reprinted and sold through OAT. - CC Community gardening has mushroomed in California in the past two years. Cities which started out with one or two experimental gardens now have extensive community garden programs involving schools, hospitals, housing projects and even city parks. Many programs are now run out of the local Parks and Recreation Departments, while others are grass-roots proje.cts started by volunteers whose efforts h~ve been bolstered with local funds and CETA positions funded by the U.S. Comprehensive Empfoyment Training Act. The appeal of community gardening varies with the gardener-whether the incentive is food, recreation, therapy or education, a harvest yields all of these and more. Neighborhoods have been energized by community gardens, as people see their own efforts changing the environment around them. In San Francisco, the residents of a senior citizens' housing project, most of them Chinese who had recently been relocated by urban renewal, felt they had little control over their own lives. A few of them started a garden across the street, and eventually some 100 of th~ residents joined in. Various public officials, impressed with the peoples' initiative, soon began visiting the garden, among them the mayor and the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Now the officials are asking the gardeners if there is anything they need. "More-compost" is usually the response. • Now California has a Community Gardens Coordinator. The process of establishing this job took two years. First, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research agreed to fund a study of state resources available to community gardens. This study concluded that for • the most part, resources are found in • funding programs whose guidelines include gardening but that do not me~tion it specifically; for example, n_utrition programs for the elderly, recreation for the handicapped, environmenral education programs and funds for the beautification of housing projects. Other re~ sources listed are state-supported service groups whose interests encompass community gardening. The FHA-Hero clubs of home economics students could for example, sponsor gardens on scho;l grounds. Once this resource report was published, it served as a proposal to the Governor's Office to create a staff position to help gardening programs tap these resources and to help state agencies start new gardens through their various programs. A year after completing the report, I was hired as the California Gardening Coordinator. The gardens that can benefit most from state re.sources are those connected with an institution of some kind. Hospitals, schools and community service agencies are beginning to include gardening in their activities, and some are already giving plots to residents of the surrourding neighborhood. Neighborhood gardens are best helped from the local level; but institutional gardens, once started, can often qualify for state and even federal assistance to expand their community outreach. A garden connected_ to an existing organization does not have to develop its own and, therefore, often evolves with fewer power struggles and greater secur_ity than many neighborhood gardens experience. In fact, the continuity of institutional gardens can be longer than the life of the sponsoring organization itself. In Ukiah, California, a garden which was started as part of a teen center was not abandoned when the teen •center closed. Instead, the garden became a senior citizens' garden, as the , facility ~hanged to a clubhouse for the elderly, but many of the original gardeners continued to participate. RAIN November 1977 Page 7 Tapping institutions may be the second phase in the growth of community gardening in America. The initial effort·was grassroots organizing, bringing gardening programs into some official sanction; this process ~as taken about five years, with astounding success. In California, more than 50 towns and c.ities have community gardening programs, and the Gallup Poll reports that 10 percent of America's gardeners are involved in a community garden. The next phase may take just as long and, once again, volunteers are playing an important role. But they are a different kind of volunteer; they are really more like moonlighting hustlers. Institutional gardens are usually initiated by a member of the existing staff. Often a local gardening program talks l a staffperson into the idea, but it takes - someone on_the "inside" to get it going. More often than not, the person finds that heading up the garden is more fun than working indoors, and convinces an administrator to allow some time for this. So the institutional garden gets land, water and a part-time coordinator without an ounce of fund raising. One of the major tasks of the Office of Appropriate Techi:iology's gardening· effort, besides helpi,rig gardening leaders find state funding and assistance, is to encourage state-supported institutions of all kinds to sponsor community gardens. For example, Folsom 'Prison would like a garden, but they need guards; volunteers from a nearby church have offered to guard. Security is the main problem, but the church peop_le teach gardening and save the prison the cost of a garden supervisor. In various cooperative efforts, institu tional land can be the proving ground for community gardening programs because it capitalizes on bringing people together. Psychiatric patients, neighborhood.residents and students.from a nq.rby school can all have garden plots on a hospital's grounds. Such dramatic models would show that people come together in a unique way •around growing food. It is a basic human endeavor. - Rosemary Menninger r.
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