Follow the link below for an article about the Richmond Greenway which includes incredible pictures of the Lincoln School Farmers in action. This article appeared as the cover story of the Rails-to-Trails e-magazine in April. Bryce Hubner wrote the article and took the pictures.
Proclamation honoring April 22nd as Earth Day 2009 and Celebrating Richmond’s Growing Community Gardens
Whereas Earth Day arose out of a grassroots effort dedicated to honoring the natural environment, and is now widely celebrated on April 22; and
Whereas Richmond is fortunate to have an active group of dedicated individuals and groups who are committed to greening Richmond through the creation and tending of our many community gardens located within the City of Richmond; and
Whereas these groups include, but are not limited to: CYCLE, the 5% Local Coalition, the Verde Partnership Garden, EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, the Library Garden, the Peace Garden, the HEAL Garden, the School Gardens of Richmond High, Lincoln Elementary, Dover Elementary and Richmond College Prep School. The efforts of these groups reflect and promote the spirit of Earth Day through their many activities and community contributions: and
Whereas it is essential to support our local efforts to build long-time food security, improve nutrition, and reconnect people with an understanding of where our food comes from and how it is grown; and
Whereas local food systems are an alternative to global corporate models where producers and consumers are separated through a chain of processors/manufacturers, shippers and retailers, while a local food system redevelops these relationships and encourages a return of quality control to the consumer and the producer; and
Whereas by focusing on local food production we can begin to reverse trends of increased energy inputs, pollution, and global warming from production and long-distance transport and distribution of food; and
Whereas community gardens empower residents to become more active in their communities, providing cross-cultural and intergenerational opportunities for community members to meet, work, exercise, and learn together; and
Whereas community gardens reflect the cultural diversity of Richmond, and include gardeners that speak a number of languages including English, Spanish, Laotian, and more; and equally important,
Whereas community gardens add beauty to our neighborhoods and provide much needed green space in higher density areas.
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that I, Gayle McLaughlin, Mayor of the City of Richmond, on behalf of the City Council, do hereby, honor the numerous individuals involved in the efforts of CYCLE, the 5% Local Coalition, the Verde Partnership Garden, EcoVillage Farm Learning Center, the Library Garden, the Peace Garden, the HEAL Garden, the School Gardens of Richmond High, Lincoln Elementary, Dover Elementary and Richmond College Prep School, and all community garden efforts in Richmond, and I urge all residents to actively participate in the greening and gardening efforts available in our community.
A big thanks to Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and Nicole Valentino who conceived of and wrote this proclamation!
| January 19, 2009 | ||
| 9:00 am | to | 1:00 pm |
The 2nd Annual MLK Day of Service on the Richmond Greenway is only 8 days away. This year, coming together as a community to honor Dr. King’s legacy and vision, and to work together to improve our own community seems even more appropriate than ever.
Here are the details:
When: 9:00 to 1:00
Where: 6th Street and the Richmond Greenway (between Chanslor and Ohio) right next to Lincoln Elementary School. Click here for map.
Why: To honor the legacy of Dr. King by coming together and working to improve our community.
What: There will be 8-10 work teams creating planting beds, planting shrubs, trees, and berry bushes, weeding, moving wood chips and compost, picking up garbage, painting garden signs, etc. Although we have lots of work lined up, there is a good chance we will get hundreds of volunteers, so expect a day that is equal parts service and social.
What Else: Speeches by East Bay Regional Park Board Member Whitney Dotson and others, DJ Goodbeer, West County Grown Organic Soups, the first 300 volunteers will get a free t-shirt and all participants can pot-up and take home a strawberry.
How About For the Kids? Face-painting, worms, seed balls, reading corner and Junior Ranger Patches
What Can You Bring? Friends, family, and neighbors, work gloves and a trowel if you have them. (We’ll have a bunch, but there could be hundreds of volunteers).
RSVP: Please email mlk@urbantilth.org if you plan to attend with your name, city, organization (if any) and phone number.
What About Groups? We are reserving many spots for Richmond residents and organizations, so please email park@urbantilth.org or call Park Guthrie at (510) 691-5051 if you have a large group you wish to bring.
Early Risers: We could still use more help setting up and directing traffic. If you are willing to show up at 7:00, please email park@urbantilth.org.
Click here for an 2009 MLK Flyer in Word Document-Spanish and English
| October 1, 2008 | ||
| 6:00 pm | to | 7:30 pm |
You are cordially invited to join the first planning meeting for the 2009 MLK Day of Service on the Richmond Greenway which will be on Monday, January 19th, 2009.
The planning meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 1st from 6:00 to 7:30 at the Nevin Community Center on 6th Street and Nevin, just down from Kaiser in the Iron Triangle.
Last year more than 150 volunteers turned out (in the rain, even) to honor the spirit and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by working together to tangibly improve our community. Volunteers on the Richmond Greenway:
—–built, filled, and planted raised garden beds at Lincoln School Farm and Berryland,
—planted California native plants and fruit trees,
—picked up garbage along the Greenway
—listened to speeches and performances inspired by Dr. King’s message
—shared a delicious lunch made from almost entirely West County produce
—danced to the tunes of DJ Goodbeer
This year we hope to bring even more folks out to the Greenway, especially Greenway neighbors. Please join us next Wednesday to start planning this important event.
Below is a list of possible committees. . .
(1) Community Outreach and Registration Committee—distributes flyers, contacts community organizations to get them involved, goes door-to-door to invite Greenway neighbors, etc. Also, organizes registration desk on day of event.
(2) Publicity and Design Committee—creates flyers, map, and program
(3) Projects and work crew leaders Committee—organizes various volunteer work crews and trains work crew leaders
(4) Work team hosts/Team Building Committee—plans team-building/socializing activity for work teams.
(5) Food Committee—solicits donations of West County ag products; organizes cooking and serving of lunch
(6) MLK Program, Entertainment and Tabling Committee—invites speakers, performers and DJ. Also invites organizations to table at the event.
Please send an email to park(at) urbantilth (dot) org or call at (510) 691-5051 if you plan to attend or have questions or suggestions.
We look forward to working with you to create a wonderful 2009 MLK Day of Service in Richmond.
Sincerely,
Doria Robinson, Park Guthrie, and Cheryl Maier
5% Local Coalition Foodshed Policy Packet
Local Government Policies, Initiatives, and Programs to Grow a Foodshed in Richmond
I. You can ask your City Council to. . .
A. Adopt a resolution that:
B. Prioritize support for food production in existing, relevant City agencies:
C. Create an urban farm business incubator to promote sustainable, green jobs and access to healthy foods.
Work with the Richmond Redevelopment Agency and RichmondWORKS to create an urban farm business incubator. Such an incubator could create 8 full-time, self-sufficient jobs on just 4 acres of land, while increasing local access to fresh, organic produce and building local knowledge about sustainable food production and market gardening. (See attachment Urban Farm Business Incubator)
D. Explore ways to create a local funding stream to support both commercial and community foodshed development in Richmond. ?This position is actually included in the draft Richmond General Plan update, Health Element. Some possible funding mechanisms include:
E. Write support for neighborhood farms and gardens into land use policies and development codes. The US Green Building Council’s Neighborhood Development-LEED Certification standards suggest reserving 5% of all residential development land for community farms and gardens. Neighborhood Developmen-LEED Certification also requires developers to fund neighborhood farm and garden infrastructure costs AND a community oversight mechanism. (Click for document LEED Neighborhood Development Local Food )
F. Involve other agencies to help fund and support foodshed development in Richmond. The County Health and Human Services Department, the Redevelopment Agency, the Chamber of Commerce, the Office of Neighborhood Safety, the WCC Unified School District, West County Waste Management, the County Agriculture Department, the UC Extension Service, the West County Business Development Corporation, and Rosie the Riveter National Park are just some examples of local agencies or organizations that have missions which would partially be advanced by growing a foodshed on our commons in Richmond/west Contra Costa County. City Council members could engage these organizations to explore jointly funding projects like a Foodshed Specialist position in Parks and Landscaping, an urban farm business incubator, or an Earth Victory Garden or Community Garden Campaign.
II. You can ask your school board to. . .
(1) Adopt resolutions recognizing the important work of school gardeners and the new Growing West County School Gardens group and encouraging all schools to develop gardening programs.
(2) Start a “Garden Bed for Every Child” campaign. WCCUSD students could be growing 25% of their total produce needs in as little as 100 square feet and 3 hours a week. (According to land use consultants at MIG, there are well over 150 acres of asphalt alone in WCCUSD schools, so we have more than enough space for 100 square feet of garden beds for each of the 30,000 WCCUSD students). Studies suggest and experience confirms that when students grow fruits and vegetables, you don’t have to work very hard to increase their intake of fruits and vegetables. Such a campaign would put WCCUSD on the cutting edge of the fight against the epidemic of diet-related health conditions and would help address inequitable access to organic produce within our community.
(3) Create a school garden council. A school garden council could facilitate communication between the administration and school gardeners, work to develop district-wide funding to support school garden programs, coordinate donations of soil, mulch, and materials, as well as pool resources to develop curriculum.
(4) Start market-garden business programs at schools which supply most of the WCCUSD salad needs or provide fresh, organic produce directly to school families. You can grow 100 pounds of salad greens a week in as little as 2,000 square feet. In addition to being, fresh, healthy, and organic, this produce would also be “high-context” and more meaningful for WCCUSD students. Richmond High School has already started a market garden program and has sold more than $500+ of RHS agricultural products in the past six months alone. For the past two years, Verde Partnership Garden has hosted monthly or biweekly produce sales at Verde Elementary, providing more than 1,000 pounds of low-cost, fresh, organic produce to the North Richmond community. With school district support, every school could become a source of fresh, organic produce, empowering our students and their families to develop healthy lifelong eating habits.
(5) Ask Nutrition services to create purchasing preferences for both within-district and within-county produced food. The school district spends tens of thousands of dollars on produce annually; right now, nearly all of that money leaves our community. By spending those dollars locally, the school district could get fresh, healthy produce AND promote a local foodshed.
(6) Help develop performance-based garden curriculum standards. Right now, most of the curriculum standards related to gardening are knowledge-based. Students learn “about” plants and other subjects related to gardening, but do not acquire the skills to actually become independent gardeners who can produce enough food to improve their own diets. Imagine if physical education standards were strictly knowledge-based. It would seem silly to have physical education classes in which students only learned about various sports or healthy activities. Approximately half of the California state curriculum standards for physical education are performance standards. We could use this as a model for developing a district gardening curriculum. With burgeoning local interest in school garden programs, West Contra Costa County Unified School District could become a national leader in garden education by developing and adopting a set of performance-based garden curriculum standards (For example, “Demonstrate the ability to transplant a tomato seedling. . .”) rather than just squeeze academic and knowledge-based curriculum into a strictly educational garden program. Our gardens can do much more than be a place where our students learn “about” things.
| September 13, 2008 | ||
| 10:00 am | to | 3:00 pm |
Great news! On Saturday, September 13th, 2o08 Richmond’s own Annie’s Annuals will be hosting their annual Do It Yourself Sale. Even better news—10% of all plant sales will be donated to Friends of the Richmond Greenway to support projects on the Richmond Greenway (like the MLK Jr. Day of Service or Berryland). You can head on over right after the Berryland work day.
http://www.anniesannuals.com/
Richmond’s own Rebecca Newburn has just launched a new blog intended to support grassroots movement towards more sustainable neighborhoods. Check it out at http://thriving-in-the-burbs.com/. She includes sustainable living newsletter templates that could be rewritten for any neighborhood. Earth Victory Gardens play a large role in her vision of more sustainable neighborhoods….Very exciting!
Class Location: Richmond Field Station
Applications will be available in July at the office (
The UCCE
In return for the training, UC Certified
MG’s are a dedicated, enthusiastic group of volunteers who continue with training every year to keep on top of our changing landscape. If you have further questions please call Program Coordinator,
Forgive me; it’s hard to resist the “doom and gloom” approach to encouraging our community develop some indepenence from the industrialized food system. There is just so much to work with these days in the doom and gloom category.
According to a Yahoo News article, this year marks the largest and “dead-est” dead zone on record for the Gulf of Mexico (Click here for the article) . Nearly all Americans (myself included) contribute to this environmental catastrophe by the simple act of consuming food from our industrialized food-chain. Fertilizer run-off from the Midwest cornfields draining into the Mississippi River is the primary cause of the dead zone. Midwest cornfields create the bulk of the calories in our food system (either directly as corn products and corn-syrup or indirectly as animal feed).
The growing dead zone is just another indication that our current method of sustaining ourselves entails depleting the ecological richness of our planet, almost certainly diminishing the quality of our children and grandchildren’s lives. It’s like slow-motion cannibalism. Today we are feeding off the future well-being and quality of life of our offspring. Not only that but, we, as taxpayers, are subsidizing this arrangement to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year tucked away in the USDA, Department of Energy, and Defense Department budgets.
What is a West Countian to do?
(1) Join the 5% Local Coalition and help create a movement towards independence from a destructive and unsustainable food system;
(2) Plant your own food garden. If you don’t have space to garden, join the 5% Local Coalition and make connections to join an existing community garden or start a new one;
(3) Contact local politicians (such as those running for Richmond City Council elections, WCCUSD board elections, or other local agencies) and ask them to make foodshed development one of their priorities. (In September, we will release a Foodshed Development Policy Guide for Voters and Politicians with specific policy ideas to promote a local foodshed). To be sustainable in the long-run, the bulk of the funds for building a local foodshed need to come from local funding streams such as donations from community members and local government revenues.
What could be more important for a community than committing at least some community resources and funding to sustaining itself in a healthy way?
A big thanks to Patagonia’s Palo Alto store which not supported the Lincoln School Farm with a grant, but also invited us to participate in the Voice Your Choice program. Drop by the Palo Alto store and cast a vote for Urban Tilth. Check out the link below to learn more…
http://www.patagonia.com/usa/patagonia.go?assetid=19706
Thanks for supporting us and so many other worthy environmental causes.
