Southside Community Land Trust Brings Healthy Food to City Dwellers
Abraham Paulos reports
For 25 years, Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT) has partnered with gardeners, neighbors, and others to demonstrably improve the quality of life and foster self-reliance through community-based food production. SLCT provides access to land, education and other resources necessary for people in the Greater Providence area to grow food in environmentally sustainable ways, as a means to creating a food system where locally produced, affordable and nutritious food is available to all. SCLT's approach is comprehensive and consists of strategies such as teaching people how to grow food; locating and managing land and increasing access to resources, skills and markets. SCLT also creates spaces where community members share tools, skills, inspiration and modeling for financially stronger neighborhoods and environmental stewardship for thousands of city dwellers, most of them living in some of Rhode Island's most impoverished neighborhoods.
Families from 165 communities grow a substantial part of their fresh produce needs in SCLT's network of nine Community Gardens in the Southside's Providence. Many of the gardeners are immigrants who are raising food for large, extended families. As many as 20 community gardeners also supplement their scant incomes by selling some of their harvest of ethnically specialty crops to neighbors, restaurants, and small grocery stores.
SCLT supplies weekly fresh produce for thousands of farmers' market customers at five sites, including SCLT's own Broad Street Farmer's Market. Last year 85% of farmers' sale at this market went to low-income individuals redeeming WIC nutrition program and Seniors' food vouchers, and Food Stamps.
SCLT's Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program enables individuals and families to purchase fresh, affordably priced, fruits, vegetables, herbs, free-range eggs, meat and other local products all summer. Three acres at Urban Edge Farm (located in Cranston, RI) supply produce to 60 member families each year. Members pay a subscription fee that is based on income and can be as low as $10 per week over a 20-week season.
SCLT offers educational programs for children, youth and adults in collaboration with numerous community partners and schools through after-school, summer and field trip programs. SCLT's Urban Agriculture Public Workshop Series for community members are offered five community sites and City Farm, SCLT's ¾ -acre inner-city organic demonstration farm. Since the series began in 2005, more than 300 adults have participated in work-shops, which cover a wide variety of topics for the urban gardener. Each year, SCLT's after-school and summertime Youth Garden Clubs introduce 70-80 inner city children and youth to the joys and rewards of growing their own food, while helping them strengthen the math, English and social skills they will need to achieve successful adulthoods
SCLT directly involves the people. Participants are involved in planning and decision-making at all levels of the organization. SCLT's 22-member Board of Directors, which plays a leadership role in the development and implementation of SCLT's Strategic Plan, includes six members who live in the Southside neighborhood. Each of SCLT's nine community garden is managed in cooperation with Community Garden Leaders, gardeners who voluntarily take on the extra duties of organizing regular garden clean-up facilitating communication with SCLT staff.
The Southside Community Land Trust is a well-deserved winner of the Harry Chapin Self Reliance Award (HCSRA) administered by Reinvesting In America (RIA). The HCSRA is awarded as a cash grant to outstanding grassroots organizations in the U.S. that have moved beyond charity to creating change in their communities. Winners are judged outstanding for their innovative and creative approaches to fighting domestic hunger and poverty by empowering people and building self-reliance.
Funding for The Harry Chapin Self-reliance Award will be used to strengthen farmer's managerial skills and ensure the sustainability of the Farm Business Incubator program. The Farm Business Incubator program began in 2003, located at SCLT's 50-acre Urban Edge Farm, currently hosts seven farm businesses, each growing produce on up to 2-acre fields. Most of the farmers are female farmers, and two do not speak English as their first language. All would face a wide range of obstacles if they attempted to go into business on their own. The Farm Business Incubator Program helps resource-limited farmers overcome language and other barriers and launch agricultural businesses. The program provides land, equipment and expertise to help them to grow produce, as well as the information and support they need to sell their products to food-buying clubs, retail stores and restaurants, and at farmers markets. In addition to land, SCLT staff provides the farmers with access to greenhouses, farm, and equipment, produce washing station and an office space with phones, computers and Internet access. Staff also offers training and guidance on organic growing practices and soils management, and business and marketing through workshops and one-on-one in-field mentoring.
