[Community_garden] Youth help in community garden for homeless in California

[Don Boekelheide]

Inside Bay Area.com
San Francisco area, California, USA

Jan 16, 2007

Students get hands dirty at Alameda public garden
Community groups join together to improve Island
collaborative's plot

By Kelly Rayburn, STAFF WRITER

ALAMEDA — For 50 or so Bay Area high schoolers, the
Martin Luther King holiday was not a day for sleeping
in or shopping at the mall.

No, they were hard at work.

Local teenagers with the Student Conservation
Association joined the Alameda Point Collaborative's
Growing Youth Project for a daylong effort to restore
the collaborative's community garden on the grounds of
the old Naval Air Station in Alameda.

For those in the Student Conservation Association, the
event Monday capped off a weekend retreat that also
included camping in below-freezing conditions in Marin
County.

"These kids are understandably very tired, but still
very motivated and working hard," said Justin Laue,
who helped organize Monday's event for the Student
Conservation Association.

The Conservation Association is a national
environmental volunteer organization for high school
and college-age people.

Laue said the local chapter had worked on projects in
the Berkeley and Oakland hills on Martin Luther King
weekend in the past few years.

This year, the group wanted to change things, he said.

"We're here to combine our conservation and
environmental work in a more urban setting," he said.

The Alameda Point Collaborative is a housing community
for some 500 formerly homeless individuals, more than
half of them under 18 years old.

The Collaborative is located on 34 acres of converted
base property.

Laue said he found the Collaborative "through the
miracle of Google" while doing Web research on
community gardens.

He subsequently got in touch with Doug Biggs, the
Collaborative's community resources director, who was
more than happy to accept the volunteers' offer.

On Monday, crews of high schoolers from both
organizations gave the garden a makeover.

They laid the groundwork for a new planting area. They
filled old garden beds with new topsoil. They leveled
off a hill. And they organized the garden shed.

"You get a sense of a community when you work in the
community," said Eva Wu, 17, a senior at Albany High
School who is in her third year with the Conservation
Association.

"And it's cool to work with people who live here,"
said Katrina Munsterman, 15, a sophomore at St.
Patrick-St. Vincent High School in Vallejo who is in
her first year with the program.

For members of the Collaborative's Growing Youth
Project, the garden is key in their efforts to move
people living at the Collaborative toward healthier
dietary habits.

The Growing Youth Project completed an extensive study
last year on how well people at the Collaborative are
eating.

It found that many did not get enough to eat, and that
those who did often made poor nutritional choices.

One problem is location. The closest food source to
the Collaborative is Hometown Donuts, on the 1900
block of Main Street.

Katie Casale, coordinator for the project, said she is
hoping to secure more funding from The California
Endowment, which funded the study, to help implement
some of the report's recommendations.

One hope is that a grocery store will eventually be
built on the old base.

For now, Dawn Carroway, 17, who is a senior at the Bay
Area School of Enterprise and who helped complete the
study, was happy to see what was being done to fix up
the garden.

She ticked off some of the crops that could be grown
there: broccoli, cabbage, beans, corn, onions, kale,
tomatoes, potatoes and more.

"You can grow whatever you want here," she said.