Growing community

This past semester, a class assignment required that I present a local organization working to improve community health.  Fortuitously, I arbitrarily selected West End Community Gardens. The gardens are located in Birmingham's West End, which has the largest concentration of urban poverty in Alabama.  The gardens were started in 2008 as an outreach of Community Church Without Walls, a local house-church congregation also located in West End.  I had the pleasure of spending a morning with Ama Shambulia, a master gardener and slow-foods chef who runs the gardens. I loved her vision for the garden: "Rekindling the memory of growing food and where food comes from."

West End Community Gardens aims to grow food and grow community, and they approach their mission through numerous avenues.  Individual planters can rent 4x8 foot plots, and volunteers work in common areas dedicated to growing food to sell at the biweekly summer curb market and to local restaurants.  Gardening classes are offered, and they are occasionally paired with cooking classes emphasizing healthy eating habits.  Ama was most excited about the internship program for area teens, offering them training in horticulture skills that she hopes will transition into career opportunities for the interns.

The fruits of the gardens are spreading to the community.  Local elementary schools have partnered with Ama to start school gardens, and juvenile offenders from Judge Brian Huff's Family Court regularly volunteer.  Ama notes how near neighbors have begun cleaning up their yards and taking ownership of the gardens.  Improvements in the neighborhood follow the theory of collective efficacy advocated by Robert Sampson and colleagues in their 1997 Science article.  If we are to hope to life to wilted communities, it must come with words and with actions.

The visit was motivating; perhaps this season I will move from killing cilantro and tomatoes on my balcony to killing them in a plot at West End.