Building community, one garden at a time

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn

No halfway house can survive without the support of the community it sits in and serves. The community support doesn’t often happen automatically -- it takes real effort on the part of the halfway house to be seen by the community as an asset. Sometimes halfway houses are seen as less than welcome presences in their neighborhoods.  This is usually the result of carelessness: sometimes on the part of the residents who live there and sometimes on the part of the employees who manage the house.

Christian Fellowship Home’s mission statement demands that we be seen as an asset to our neighborhood, which is a mixed used area adjacent to the center core of the city. It’s a neighborhood in flux, trying hard to recover from many years of “white flight” and urban decay and neglect.  The newest group of stakeholders, residential single-family property owners, has a vision of eventual gentrification that doesn’t always mesh with the present day reality of absentee landlords, rental properties, and a sizeable number of people in poverty.

In an effort to improve conditions and move the quality of living in our neighborhoods forward, our town has developed neighborhood associations.

The Villa Place Neighborhood Association represents the neighborhood where our halfway house sits, and we have tried hard to be a good neighbor to it.  Our residents pick up litter on Grace Street regularly through the Keep America Beautiful program.  They keep our buildings and grounds neat and maintained. At the yearly neighborhood association festival, we sponsor a food pantry, staffed by residents.

When Martin P. lived at the men’s home he discovered a passion for gardening.  He liked taking care of the yard so much that the house manager assigned him the chore permanently. He filled the flower beds around the house with flowers of all kinds, many of them bought at his own expense. He moved out when he got his own place and continued his work on the grounds as a volunteer, and does so to this day.

That’s how Martin met Ms. Barbara Johnson, the president of the neighborhood association. The association had been given the space for a community garden  in a vacant lot two blocks down, and after seeing his handiwork with the house beds, Ms. Johnson wanted his input and help on “fixing up” the community garden, which had an official sign to announce it’s presence, and very little else.

So a wonderful idea was born – to transform the empty lot into a miniature urban green space, with ornamental plantings and a central paved area to sit in. Martin drew up a master plan and a materials list with prices to estimate the cost.  But how was the project to be funded?

Lakeside Baptist Church had done several work projects to improve the Men’s Home over the years, including projects that had components like patio paving and flower bed construction. Would they be interested in adopting the Villa Place Community Garden as a work project?

It took a few months to work out the details, but Senior Pastor Jodie Wright’s congregation embraced the project, undertook the funding of materials, and even contributed a lovely new detail – they would construct and install a mini-library in the central paved area, with books on urban gardening, do-it-yourself home fix up projects, and other titles suited to our neighborhood. Our garden would be a garden of the mind and spirit as well as plants! The vision for our community garden was complete.

The city government, of course, had to give their green light on the project as well. Last night, the three of us – Martin, Ms. Barbara, and me, sat somewhat nervously in the planning department’s big committee room, while the Historic Preservation Commission reviewed our plans and asked questions.  And we got their approval! With our Certificate of Appropriateness in hand, our project was truly on the way!

So on a Saturday morning in early November, volunteers will meet to build the little park, and celebrate a useful and beautiful improvement to our neighborhood’s landscape. But we’ll also be celebrating something else: the synergy that can come together for the good of all when a halfway house, a neighborhood association and a church’s congregation all pull together to make the world a slightly better place.