As we gear up (semi-literally!) to go garden today, let's keep in mind the whole idea of community. Community is key to bringing back neighborhoods.
How did you feel about community gardens before today? How did you feel about the work we did? Share your thoughts! And check out Toni's post below this for some gardening inspiration.
I think it's important to ask ourselves some of the questions that McKinney posed as we left the site today: Who is this garden building community with? What is it going to take to get people living and working in this neighborhood. I think that in a lot of cases, community gardens without sufficient funding don't have the same positive impact that they could on communities with the right amount of enthusiasm and financial support. When this is the case, they end up wasting subsidies that could have been utilized more efficiently elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bridgett it is important to ask ourselves the questions Professor McKinney asked us today.
ReplyDeleteI am unsure how I feel about community gardens. While they appear to help the community, it’s unclear if they make a significant impact in the long run. This is not a long-term fix to our problem. However this may lead to people caring more about their community due to feeling responsible and having personal investment in community projects.
I find it very telling about the impact of the garden when the community members do not appear to be out in the gardens. Instead volunteers (some from the community, others not) are taking their time and putting in effort to make the gardens benefit the people living in the community of the gardens location.
I have to admit that I was not necessarily enthused about the community gardens. I thought that a garden was not going to solve a communities problems with selling and buying homes. But when we got there today, after planting and what not, I started to see that simply planting a flower can make a huge difference. The street automatically started looking better to me. In my mind, I felt that it could make a difference in the scenery. And to someone who was looking for a house, could immediately see the effort put in to making the community a caring place.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that bothered me a bit, was that there were not more people from the street helping us plant and garden. I think the members of the community should care about their home and surrounding areas. Overall, I really enjoyed today. Great way to spend an hour or so!
I think community gardens have a lot of potential but like some of the other posts I know it's not a long-term fix. I do think that they have the ability to bring neighbors out of their houses and to unite the community.
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