Hawaii: There Are 10 Community Gardens On Oahu. None Of Them Are On The Westside
Unequal access to community gardens has some people calling for a revamp of the decades-old program.
By Claire Caulfield
Civil Beat
Mar 8, 2021
Excerpt:
As vice chair of the Ewa Neighborhood Board, Parnes knows she isn’t the only person in West Oahu who would like a community garden. But when she approached the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation in 2019, she was told the department wasn’t accepting proposals for new gardens.
“It’s an equity issue,” Parnes said. “This is a beautiful community full of great people and we deserve nice things. We pay taxes but we just don’t get them.”
Seven of the 10 publicly funded community gardens run by the City and County of Honolulu are in southern Oahu. None are located on the Westside. And although they’re billed as a leisure option for apartment-dwellers in metro areas, a new garden hasn’t opened in more than three decades — even as other areas across Oahu have urbanized.
Now, a growing number of people across in West Oahu are calling on the city to expand the community garden program with a focus on equity, food security and righting past wrongs.
Parnes said she wishes she would have pushed back against the parks department in 2019 because the pandemic made her realize all the ways a community garden could have helped her neighbors.
“Obviously I didn’t know that we’d be doing food banks every single weekend,” she said. “It would have been nice if we could have had a community garden up and going to augment.”
