Victory Garden Initiative
Two years ago, Felicia Wilkins became a community garden leader at Kayla’s Garden in Metcalfe Park, mainly because she wanted to learn more about gardening. Wilkins, a full-time caregiver for her grandmother, also serves as a board member of Metcalfe Park Community Bridges. She lives around the corner from Kayla’s Garden, which is across the street from the Dr. Wesley L. Scott Senior Living Community (2805 W. 28th St.). “I accepted the position as garden leader because I wanted to learn more about gardening,” Wilkins says. “I started my own garden in the backyard, and it didn’t do so well. I went to the community garden to get some advice from the young ladies across the street at the senior center.”
Kayla’s Garden is part of a vibrant network of community gardens that have been created by volunteer residents. Many receive help from Groundwork Milwaukee, a nonprofit that helps interested groups lease vacant lots from the city of Milwaukee and provides resources for developing and maintaining the gardens. Milwaukee owns almost 3,000 vacant lots and foreclosed properties. Community gardens continue to grow in popularity. In 2013, Groundwork Milwaukee had only 45 gardens. It now works with 112 community gardens across the city—up 15% from last year.
“Community gardens bring wonderful benefits to the residents of a neighborhood,” says Tim McCollow, HOME GR/OWN project manager at the Environmental Collaboration Office of the City of Milwaukee. “Academic research shows that green spaces have a positive impact on property values and that they increase neighborhood safety,” he continues. “The best thing about a community garden to me is creating a new town commons in a neighborhood, where, in our more fragmented world, residents get to meet each other.”
Cross-Generational Collaboration
At Kayla’s Garden, seniors from Scott Senior Living Community enjoy gardening and have plenty of know-how to share with Wilkins and the younger generation in the neighborhood. It’s a win-win situation: The seniors don’t have their own yards anymore and appreciate having a nearby place to garden, and the young people from the neighborhood like to learn and enjoy the attention they get from the seniors.
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“Last year, we had a group of young people out there helping out for the summer, and every day they went home with something they picked out of the garden,” Wilkins says. “The seniors don’t mind anyone from the community coming to the garden and taking what they need, as long as it’s what they really need.”
Last year, 13 young people worked in the garden, alongside the seniors. At the end of summer, they received stipends. “They learned a lot about how to garden, how to keep up the plants and take down the weeds, and they also learned about the value of the fruits and vegetables to their health,” Wilkins says. “With the seniors volunteering their time to share what they know with the kids, it was beautiful,” she says. “The kids loved it. They had Fridays off, but even on Fridays, they still wanted to come to the garden. They really enjoyed the wisdom of the elderly from across the street. They couldn’t get enough of it.”
Residents at Scott Senior Living Community do more than garden at Kayla’s Garden. Two years ago, Wilkins hosted an event called Art in the Garden, where the seniors and young people created intergenerational artwork. The event attracted 86 people—so many that the residents needed to block off part of the street to accommodate the large crowd. Also, a dilapidated house on a lot next to Kayla’s Garden was recently razed, and now the garden will expand onto another lot. This season, residents are planning a major renovation of the garden in conjunction with the expansion. Community residents are already talking about what they would like to do.
Wilkins says residents would like more benches and chairs, possibly a gazebo, better lighting, space for yoga and meditation and a dedicated space for the younger children, “so they won’t run through the garden and tear things down—maybe a large tic-tac-toe game and some colorful stumps to sit on.”
Activating Dead Spaces; Outgrowing Crime
HOME GR/OWN’S McCollow says the newly developed green spaces such as community gardens and a string of new small parks and green spaces developed by HOME GR/OWN help to increase neighborhood social cohesion. “If two neighbors from either end of the block who don’t know each other meet at that community garden, all of a sudden they are caring more about each other, and they are looking out for each other, and that’s probably one of the reasons that public safety increases and crime drops.”
David Johnson, owner of the 1.5-acre Cream City Farms—a commercial urban farm on Milwaukee’s North Side—says any time a space that’s basically dead is activated, it will have a positive impact on the neighborhood and the immediate community. Johnson also has a degree in urban planning. “One of the things we need to rethink as a society and as municipalities is that, for whatever reason, we’ve made a decision to give tax breaks to people who own spaces that are dead and inactive,” Johnson says. “We should penalize these land owners for these dead spaces and incentivize people who do something with that space versus incentivizing doing nothing.”
Cream City Garden
Academic research into the benefits of developing vacant lots into community gardens has been done in other cities. For example, in a 2016 study published in Urban Studies found that developing vacant lots into green space significantly reduced crime in Youngstown, Ohio, where 1/3rd of all city properties were vacant. According to Milwaukee Police Department data, there are more than 6,500 vacant properties in the city, which doesn’t include nearly 3,000 foreclosed properties now owned by the City of Milwaukee.
“Because we know these spaces have negative impacts, we need to have policies in place that motivate the owners of these spaces to activate them in some way,” says Johnson.
The results of a new Milwaukee-specific study on the impact of community gardens will soon be available. Jared Olson, a doctoral candidate in public and community health at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has been taking a close look at Milwaukee’s community gardens. After surveying 17 community garden leaders, Olson found that neighbors were taking control of vacant lots that were an issue within their neighborhood.
“Maybe there was some activity there that they didn’t want, or perhaps there was some large-scale dumping or litter,” Olson explains. Then, by building a community garden, residents “replaced it with other things they thought their neighborhood was missing.” Residents often talked about a lack of a beautiful place where people can gather, and they then said, ‘We’re going to create this space; we’re going to insure that it’s just not garden space, but that it has benches and public art.’” He discovered that the garden leaders disliked seeing an empty space in their neighborhoods and wanted to see it put to productive use, and because of the density of vacant lots on the North Side, residents do not expect these lots to have houses in the near future. “Folks are looking for other ways to make them into productive spaces,” he says.
Turning Residents into Neighbors
Olson states that residents understand that there’s been an erosion of connections between residents in certain neighborhoods. He notes that people who take on block groups are the same people who are doing organizing within their neighborhood. One woman told him that community gardens are “turning residents into neighbors,” he relates, adding that community gardens have built a virtuous circle.
“People see something happening within the neighborhood,” Olson says. “They see a little library go up; they see garden beds go in. They come over and ask what’s going on here, who’s doing this, what are you guys trying to do and offer to build benches for that space. Or a group of kids will see that and help keep it clean and reduce the litter and make sure it is taken care of.” As a part of his ongoing research, Olson will quantitatively measure the effects of community gardens on diet, physical activity and stress and will compare non-gardeners to gardeners. It will include data from 65 people.
Growing Businesses through Urban Farming
Ryan Schone, micro-farms and local foods coordinator at the Milwaukee County UW-Extension, is in the preliminary stages of planning a countywide study on the effects of community gardening. He plans to work with researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The UW-Extension has 10 community gardens in Milwaukee county parks. The gardens cover 75 acres and serve 500 families. Many of the gardeners using these plots are growing commercially. UW-Extension’s Emerging Farmer program helps micro-farmers obtain land and grow crops, while also providing marketing education.
Programs such as Groundwork Milwaukee’s Young Farmers teach middle school and high school students how to grow food and how to market it. “I’ve heard from some of the youth that the reason they’re interested in urban agriculture is because they want to be their own boss,” says Nick DeMarsh, food systems director at Groundwork Milwaukee. He says that the idea of self-determination is motivating people. “If you start a community garden or if you are in our Young Farmers program, you want to be the driver of change in your life.”
Milwaukee is the home of Will Allen, founder of the now defunct Growing Power, which dissolved last December. Allen founded Growing Power in 1993 and received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award 10 years ago for his work in urban agriculture. “The tremendous growth in community gardens has a lot to do with Will Allen and seeing that I can do what he did in my own neighborhood,” DeMarsh says. “Urban agriculture is something you can do. If you look out in the world and you see an issue, it just so happens that urban agriculture addresses one of those issues. It could be from a health, environmental, social or community perspective. If you have an issue that’s burning within you, and you want to see change, urban agriculture allows you to take on that change,” DeMarsh says.
David Johnson remembers visiting Growing Power in 2008, when he had just become executive director of Friedens Community Ministries, which runs food pantries across the city. “For me, I wouldn’t be doing urban agriculture if I hadn’t learned about Growing Power and taken a tour. I was just blown away by what was going on there. I knew instantly I needed to engage the food pantries that Friedens operated with growing food,” Johnson says.
He immediately approached The Guest House—Milwaukee’s largest publicly funded homeless shelter—with a plan to start an aquaponic facility there, which eventually evolved into a community garden for Guest House residents. Johnson’s plan was not just to have the residents grow and consume more fresh food but also to gain urban farming skills. “I saw tremendous economic opportunity in 2008 in urban agriculture and still believe that that’s there today,” Johnson says. “We’re at the ground floor of this.”
Urban agriculture continues to boom in its many forms in Milwaukee as witnessed by the growing number of community, backyard and commercial gardens in the city. This year, the Victory Garden Initiative Blitz will install raised bed number 4,000. The demand for fresh, locally grown food is real. Food is being grown everywhere, and the urban ag revolution is quietly transforming neighborhoods and changing the way people eat and live in ways we have yet to measure.
