All About Steve

Just this past summer, Green Guerillas cut the lock off the fence of a once-vibrant community garden that had fallen into disrepair. We put up fliers, knocked on doors, and went to community meetings to drum up interest. Community members, a teacher in the school across the street, and a social service center for formerly homeless people answered the call. In one growing season, they transformed the site into a garden together. This year, they are hatching plans to green an entire part of the neighborhood and train youth from the local housing project along the way. All that energy was there, looking for a concrete project to harness it. We just took some organizing, a little guidance, a few hundred dollars in materials, added water, and watched the project grow.

We helped get a project like this off the ground -- the Greens for Queens Urban Farm. You should reach out to them for advice and support. Our advice? To make a church-based garden work, the congregation needs to be involved in every aspect and involved all week long -- not just after church on Sunday.

Many of the community gardeners we work with cleaned out vacant lots full of materials and activities that nobody wanted on their street. They weren't necessarily acting as environmentalists or garden advocates. Community gardening was the tool they had to bring their neighbors together to make their neighborhoods a little safer, a bit more humane. So we encourage them to tell their stories to everyone who will listen -- the common cause is right there to be found, in those stories.

The American Community Gardening Association can help you get started, expand, or develop strategies to fight City Hall. ACGA has publications, workshops, and an incredibly skilled group of people who serve as board and staff. They also have a listing of community gardens by state.

We distribute organic seeds to gardeners, but we do not require gardeners to use organic practices in order to receive help from us. And you raise an interesting point: Could a truly urban farm be certified organic? There are some people out there whose focus on food and organics is deeper than ours -- in New York City, it's Just Food.

There is definitely no "cookie-cutter" solution to the issue of garden governance. We work with community garden groups who have formal bylaws, regular meetings, and membership dues. Other groups have functioned for years with much looser arrangements. What seems to work best is when the structure fits the gardening group and has not been imposed on the group by an outside force or by one person.

Garden groups that hold to a few important core beliefs (that transcend squabbles and the rules designed to suppress them) tend to stick together in the long run and buy themselves the time they need to develop an appreciation for alternative points of view.

Obviously, urban centers with old buildings will present challenges for rooftop gardening. Currently, our energies are focused on ground-level gardens, so we definitely are not experts on rooftop food growing. In New York City, there are a few groups people can turn to such as Sustainable South Bronx and Earth Pledge Foundation. The City of Chicago also has a green roofs initiative.

The gardeners who cultivate the Liz Christy garden have had their fair share of challenges lately. Their beautiful garden is in the middle of a large urban redevelopment plan that includes new housing, retail space, and a community center. They fought hard to get their garden preserved, negotiating with the city and the developer to put a protection plan in place and obtaining a capital fund that will be used to revitalize the garden once construction is completed. For now, they are just working to keep their garden alive next to an enormous construction site.

I didn't get a chance to attend, but other Green Guerillas did. They were especially struck by how open and available to the community the gardens are in Minneapolis. And they talked about how other groups in other cities do a great job of getting good feedback from people about why they value community gardens, even if they are not involved. We can always do a better job of that in NYC.