MidSummer Slump?!

My sincerest apologies for not posting for a couple days; the SoS folks have been really busy during this first month as our projects have gotten under way. I spent all of last Wednesday working on community gardens with the Harrison Neighborhood Association, one of our community partners in North Minneapolis. A couple other SoS volunteers and myself worked on "beautifying" the gardens by planting flowers around the beds. At one point, though, I found myself questioning the allocation of funds towards flowers when the main concern in this part of Minneapolis is food security. It didn't really make sense to me that the HNA would be spending their money on aesthetics when there are people to be fed. In my past research and work on Urban Agriculture, I considered this to be the primarily goal of community gardening, so I was a little dismayed at this effort.
After a couple hours of early morning work, the plants were all in the soil, and the garden we were working on looked infinitely different. AND THAT'S WHERE I HAD AN EPIPHANY.

Not really. Part of my understanding of this effort is that we need to prioritize our goals, and I will always consider food security to be a primary goal. However, I did come to a realization about the targets we set, and I may be looking at things the wrong way. Certainly, it's easy to arrange them in a list: task 1, task 2, task 3. But, something I've noticed about community development is that it's integrative. A beautified garden - in this case, HNA's Gramercy "Perennial Peace Garden" - is communicating something about the community wide values that go hand in hand with goals like food security and job creation. The work that we did on the garden was in order to create a useful, beautiful, valuable green space for the residents of a community that is considered a "food desert" because of the lack of fresh produce available. In this case, I guess I came to the realization that the goals that seem less "concrete" than food security are just as important because they nourish the community values (pun intended!) necessary for development on a wider scale.

Here's a photo!

This is the HNA's Logan Garden in North Minneapolis. We spent a lot of time putting compost on the beds and staking up tomatoes and beans on Wednesday.



Most of the rest of last week, I was working on research for the ARISE coalition, our partner for Green Industry. At this point in the summer, it's pretty easy to drown under the workload and focus on specific tasks rather than the overall vision that brought me here. This week especially, I found myself stressing about making specific contacts and completing mini projects. I had a moment on Wednesday night where I was looking online for information about year round farming techniques on industrial sites, and began to panic that this work was futile and never would be realistically implemented.
For ARISE, we're trying to compile a template that can be used for re developing industrial sites into multiple use green manufacturing centers. The sites will include residential space, commercial space, food production, industrial buildings, transportation, and a slew of other really awesome things. The only glitch is, this tremendous undertaking can be a little intimidating at times. I suppose I was starting to feel that my rudimentary Google search of "green roof job creation" wasn't going to take us anywhere. Which is a legitimate concern, I think.
It wasn't until Thursday morning's meeting when we reanalyzed our goals that I felt a little more stable about this effort. I suppose one of my main concerns is getting bogged down in the semantics of each project, and losing sight of the ultimate goal. ARISE has our eyes on a few sites throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul, and we've made contacts in relation to each one. We've been speaking to city council members and other political entities. Everyone has completed a ton of research up until this point. In short, we are making amazing progress for a project that was allocated only 2 months of our time.

So, moral of the story: the Midsummer Slump has probably been hitting SoS volunteers all over the place, but I think handling it is just a matter of considering the integrative effort we're laying down while we're here. And, of course, the long term goal of changing the world. Probably something to be excited about.