Building community and a new garden in Rogers Park
The members of the Rogers Park Green Space and Food Systems Coalition have long believed in the power of growing food to energize a community.
When the group – an urban project partner of Angelic Organics Learning Center – lost their ten-year-old garden last November, they were forced to dismantle a space that hundreds of individuals worked very hard to create. But the new community that formed around the deconstruction of the garden rallied once again on Saturday, June 27th, when the group installed a new community garden at the Chicago Park District’s Schreiber Park.
Dozens of volunteers arrived early in the morning to meet trucks full of soil that was soon to become the new edible garden plots. The work crew included many neighbor plot holders and volunteers, as well as refugee clients of Heartland Alliance’s Marjorie Kovler Center and Refugee Health Programs; students, teachers and parents from the Chicago Waldorf School and ; and representatives from Loyola University's Solutions to Environmental Problems (STEP) Program, Family Empowerment Centers, Pan-African Association, and Schreiber Park Advisory Council -- all neighborhood organizations that are sharing in the creation, care and harvest of the new garden.
Bringing to life the garden design (co-created by the leadership team and the Learning Center’s Thea
Carlson), some volunteers lay cardboard down to suppress weeds while others carted wheelbarrows full of soil to the new plot locations staked with flags. A group of Bhutanese refugees excelled at forming the soil into mounded beds, and soon everyone wanted to learn their technique. By midday, the group had finished distributing the soil among 32 beds, labeling plots and erecting fences, and over the next week master gardeners were on hand daily to help plot holders enthusiastically fill their beds with starts and seeds. Now that they have a new garden home at Schreiber Park, the Rogers Park Green Space and Food Systems Coalition has a real chance to share the space and use it to re-envision their food system and form new relationships. Everyone involved looks forward to working together in the coming months and years to make sure that food production and community-based action on behalf of gardens is a success in Rogers Park.
The new garden Schreiber Park Community Garden is supported by a Gardenburger Community Garden Grant, Heifer International (through the partnership with Angelic Organics Learning Center), and contributions from the individuals and institutions that maintain plots in the garden.
To learn more about our Urban Initiative and see more photos of the new garden, visit www.learngrowconnect.org/urban