[Community_garden] Urban Farming non-profit grows food in Los Angeles - California, USA

[Don Boekelheide]

Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, California, USA

February 11, 2007

Students put their salad days to good use at vegetable
garden

Young planters till the soil for Urban Farming, a
nonprofit that gives produce to food banks.

By Martha Groves
Times Staff Writer

Seventh-grader Melina Resto was far from thrilled at
the prospect of spending her Saturday planting
lettuce, sweet golden bell peppers and red cabbage at
the Veterans' Garden on the West Los Angeles Veterans
Affairs campus. 

But by the time she and dozens of other student
volunteers had poked several flats of seedlings into
neat rows in a vegetable patch, she decided that the
experience was actually pretty cool. "I'm kind of glad
to be here now," said Melina, 12, of Silver Lake,
crouching to straighten a tender bit of Swiss chard.

The occasion was a midday planting organized by Urban
Farming, a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 with
the lofty aim of eradicating hunger by planting food
crops on unused land in urban areas. 

Started in Detroit, the group has helped launch
gardens at schools in Los Angeles, New York,
Minneapolis and Montego Bay, Jamaica, that provide
healthful snacks and help teach students about
gardening and nutrition. Schools donate a percentage
of their harvests to local food banks.

In St. Louis, the organization has worked with the
Rams professional football team to plant an "edible"
rooftop garden in the shape of a football field at
America's Center, the convention complex that includes
the stadium where the team plays. The group also
encourages corporations to include food when
landscaping office buildings and campuses. And it
seeks to enhance a sense of community by bringing
together volunteers young and old.

So far, Urban Farming has distributed five tons of
produce to food banks in the cities where it operates.

"It has grown a lot quicker than I thought," said Taja
Sevelle, a singer and songwriter who founded Urban
Farming in Detroit after realizing that acres of
vacant land could be cultivated to help ease hunger
among the city's poor.

Last April, Joyce Lapinsky, a friend of Sevelle who is
Urban Farming's program development consultant, met
with the Westside Food Bank. The Veterans' Garden, a
horticultural therapy program for veterans with
physical or mental disabilities, had made a portion of
its 15 acres available to the food bank, which
distributes to shelters, meal programs and food
pantries in western Los Angeles County. Urban Farming
agreed to coordinate the planting and care of a
vegetable garden.

Lapinsky enlisted Eileen Duncan, a volunteer who works
with a master gardening program through the UC
Extension program, to find young planters. Duncan's
e-mail campaign drew about 50 students and teachers
from the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies,
Westchester High School and a Boy Scout troop. Parent
volunteers were enlisted to ferry some of the students
from Westchester when a bus failed to show up. The
volunteers arrived bearing gardening gloves and went
to work under sunny skies.

The timing is ideal for a program such as Urban
Farming, Duncan said, with the current "emphasis on
improving student nutrition and the large homeless
population."

For Chrischelle Hawkins, 17, a senior at Westchester
High, the experience was a first. "I've never done
gardening," she said. "It was fun."

In addition to feeling good about helping the
community, the student volunteers got a bonus. Rapper
TI showed up unannounced to thank them. "It's a
pleasure, for real," he told the star-struck teens as
they fired up cellphone cameras to capture images as
he posed with them and strolled the garden patch.

TI's appearance was courtesy of Atlantic Records, an
Urban Farming sponsor. Craig Kallman, the record
company's chief executive, presented the group with
$25,000. Also appearing was actor-comedian Richard
Lewis, Lapinsky's husband.

Other supporters include Starbucks and Whole Foods
Market. Among the Los Angeles institutions with Urban
Farming gardens are the Brentwood Science Magnet
School, Chabad Israel Center of Los Angeles, the Los
Angeles Leadership Academy and the Accelerated School.
The group also hopes to start a green science garden
at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies.

For Bruce Rosen, president of the Westside Food Bank
and Friends of the Vets' Garden, a nonprofit group
that supports the veterans' therapy, the event offered
a sense of hope.

"Magical, healing things can happen in a garden," he
said.

*

martha.groves at latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-farming11feb11,1,2040831.story?track=rss
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times