Female Entrepreneurs Tend Community Gardens While Growing Their Small Businesses, Too
“Community Gardens are places of healing,” she says. “Connecting with the land and being outside is healing, growing food and medicine is healing, having access to fresh, local produce is healing, creating connections with other gardeners is healing, enjoying the beauty of a garden is healing.”
By Andy Corbley
Good News Network
Apr 19, 2021
Excerpt:
Take New York’s Amanda David, Owner of Rootwork Herbals, manager of a community medicine garden, and recent recipient of the $10,000 cash prize accompanying the Made for More Small Business Award. For David, helping people reconnect with the Earth is a full-time job, particularly through the growing of medicinal herbs and produce.
“The healing that comes through tending plants together in community is as old as humankind, so I don’t consider it a trend, however I do love to see more and more folks reclaiming it,” says David.
“This reclamation is particularly powerful for inner city folks… and others who have systematically lost access to land and thus the healing it offers.”
Urban community gardens, like the Food Forest at Browns Mill in Atlanta, are growing rapidly in popularity across the country. Between 2012 and 2018 the number of community gardens in the U.S. increased 44%, totaling 29,000 in 100 major cities.
Often this takes form as garden plots in city parks, but has even been started in the ruins of old properties. David manages one of these community gardens on Native American land south of Ithaca, New York, and hosts herbalism classes for people looking to connect with that tradition, as well as an apothecary where she sells herbal remedies.
