Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize Letter Home April 2014

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1 1 The garden is in full bloom, but unfortunately it was a bit of a tough month: we had our first incident of dumping since the development of the garden. Someone came by and left 12 used car tires to the side of the garden, near the street. Tires are a frequently dumped item in North Richmond. Ironically, the week before this occurred, I had attended a meeting at Richmond City Hall where several residents and community organizers had expressed that gardens and dumping were mutually exclusive: where you have gardens, you don t get dumping. That had been the case for our project until this month. Obviously the dumpers were aware of the garden, and the dumping is fortunately closer to the street than to the creek. In a way, the placement of tires was rather polite. But the tires, in addition to being unpleasant to look at, have caused a lot of trouble at the site, as local kids have been playing with the tires and have unfortunately done quite a bit of damage to the pollinator garden, crushing (and likely killing) over 20 native California poppy plants, several blue sky lupines and a variety of other native species. While we are happy to see that the kids are getting outside and playing in the garden, the tires have caused this outside activity to be destructive. Given that the bulk of the winter rains have passed us by, it is unlikely that the pollinator garden will recover before the summer. Which is a real shame, because it was doing so well! Finally, the tire dumping is unfortunate because it attracts more dumping: if people think it s ok to dump there, they will continue to do so. Sure enough, a few weeks later, seven more tires were dumped at the site. Full view of pollinator garden, before dumping/tire crushing:

2 The tires that were dumped: 2

3 3 Pollinator garden, after the kids had rolled the tires through it: It s been a discouraging development. There are programs in North Richmond intended to prevent dumping and to pick up tires once they have been dumped. When we first contacted the county about the dumping, they said the tires would be picked up within the week. When three weeks passed and the tires still had not been retrieved (in the meantime, the pollinator garden was crushed), we tried to get in contact with the county again. When we finally did get in contact with them, they told us that the pick-up program is undergoing a transition from being managed by Richmond Sanitary Service to being managed by the Public Works department (or perhaps vice versa, it s still not entirely clear to me). The result is that the tires will not be picked up until July, at the earliest. It is completely outrageous, to say the least, the way services like this are provided (or more accurately, NOT provided) to this underserved community. While the folks I know who work within the North Richmond community to help keep it clean and safe are incredibly dedicated and hard-working, there seems to be a degree of apathy from the County and the City of Richmond. This apathy effectively encourages this sort of dumping: it appears that no one cares, so why not dump the tires? When services aren t provided to the community, blight occurs, and blight begets more blight. There s been some progress with regard to the North Richmond Gardens collaboration that I mentioned in my last letter: the garden organizations appeared before the North Richmond Mitigation Fee Committee at the beginning of the month and proposed a yearly amount

4 4 (approximately $50,000, spread across all gardens and organizations) that would help keep these gardens up and running indefinitely into the future. Needless to say, this is an exciting possibility for the garden organizations. The Committee was drafting a budget for the budget year at the meeting, and the current draft lists $40,000 to be allocated to these garden projects: it was previously only listed at $20,000 before we came and spoke at the meeting. The grant application for this pool of money should be released soon. One member of the Committee expressed a very interesting point: he felt that, for garden projects to really be worthwhile, they should be educational; i.e. you aren t just giving out food, but you are also teaching people how to grow their own food. This was an important reminder for us to refocus our efforts on education, and not get too caught up in just maintaining the garden itself. At our volunteer event this month, we made sure to teach our volunteers about exactly what they were doing and why, giving them a thorough background in the subject that will hopefully stick with them for many years into the future. While we of course have been educating volunteers at all of our events, we changed the format slightly at this event so as to really emphasize the educational aspect of the workday. With the volunteers help, we harvested a bountiful crop of swiss chard, beets, lettuce, and mustard greens, and planted a new summer crop of tomatoes, tomatillos and peppers.

5 5 The volunteers took some crops home; we gave out the majority of the harvest to the neighbors and residents of 1st street. We took a small bundle of greens to the Mobile Farmers Market : a food truck that sells fruits and vegetables in North Richmond on Wednesdays during the afternoon. We donated those greens so that community members who come to the food truck, but can t afford to buy any of the produce on the truck, can still walk away with some vegetables in hand (that is to say, we give them away for free). Finally, we installed some much needed seating at the site, so that community members can sit and relax in the garden: