Success Stories
Michigan Street Community Garden Story
I would like to share with you a story about the creation of the Michigan Street Community Garden. For those of you not familiar with this Garden, it is located in James Bay just behind the Legislature. It is a small plot on the edge of a parking lot that contains 20 raised garden plots and a communal garden area along the perimeter. The driftwood fence and the cob (or Clay) tool hut make the place a quaint and almost magical little oasis among the government office buildings and parking lots.
The story of the Michigan Street Garden is such a successful example of our garden creation programming. But it's so much more than creating a garden. The story of the Michigan Street Garden is a tale that weaves together so many complex issues. It is a story of transformation, of complex characters, and of what it takes to bring a community together in a real, meaningful way.
In 1999 a group of community members in James Bay approached LifeCycles with the idea of creating a community garden. The BC Buildings Corporation was approached about using a vacant piece of land on the edge of a parking lot and the planning began. I was so looking forward to the position of coordinating a youth Environment Team to work with the Michigan Street Community Garden Collective to design and create the garden.
I imagined it would be a fun and light project after having just come back from working on a very difficult project in an urban shantytown in Argentina. Little did I know that creating a community garden could get people quite worked up and raise all sorts of emotional issues.
We had three months and a budget of about $500 to construct 20 raised garden plots, a fence, a tool shed, a set of compost bins, a communal garden area, and install irrigation. Over the course of the three months I saw this community transformed by the garden. Not only the residential community but also those that work here. All the government employees who ventured over on their lunch breaks to see the progress, to comment on how amazing this was… "What a great idea", "That mud hut sure is neat", and "Boy that beats a leaky condo". It was so satisfying for myself and I know for the volunteers as well to see such physical results of hard effort. To see the physical change of a parking lot. Gardens reclaiming the pavement.
I remember going to a series of particularly contentious garden meetings. At the time the garden collective, of which Lifecycles was a member, was trying to create their policies for operating the garden, for accepting new members, for possibly having to evict a member and for how to set up their committees. There were also of course esthetic design differences. We debated endlessly over the benefits of a driftwood fence vs. a chain link one. Now when you see the beautiful garden fence you think, "who even thought that chain link was a possibility".
Also of great contention was the fact that it wasn't a first come first serve waiting list for garden plots and that it was a list of interest instead, in which a person would have to show a commitment to the collective in order to receive a garden plot- they would have to agree to work on the community plots in exchange for receiving their own plot. Great amount of debate ensued. Some tempers flared. Some kept silent. The garden collective had always tried to be inclusive and it wasn't so much contention over how the decisions were made- it was just over the decisions themselves. But I was quite disturbed by the conflict and felt somehow responsible that there was conflict on the project.
One night I came home with a headache and was unloading the events of the meeting with my roommates. "Its so hard to see people so torn up over the creation of a community garden." I was lamenting. This is all so tense. In a confused voice my roommate said "Uhh, We're talking about gardening here, right?" " I mean this isn't rocket science. This is supposed to be simple. Isn't it supposed to be a happy little garden project?"
And this is when it dawned on me that the work we do with LifeCycles is about some of the most fundamental human issues, the same ones that have dominated of all human history. That is the struggle for food and the struggle for control over land. It was a land tenure issue. This is what most of the peasant uprisings all over the world have been about--Access to land to grow food. And I then realized that I had to approach this project in an entirely new and sensitivity embraced way.
My own view of the impact and importance of the work we do changed that day. It meant that I had to accept the struggle as a natural and necessary part of community process. That everyone needed to come to the agreement of how they would organize themselves in order for them to feel like they were a part of the project, a part of the community and could feel proud of the end result. The collective came through those decisions and made those agreements and I think the result is outstanding. It is a real credit to that community process that the garden is still thriving today- four years later. That it is tended with great amount of care, that the members are doing their communal job as well as maintaining their individual plots. And that everyone who is or has been involved feels a tremendous sense of pride every time they walk past the garden. I know I do.
Ruth Whyte