Canada: Community and school gardens don’t magically sprout bountiful benefits
For school gardens to work, the planning and administrative labour and permissions for a spring garden need to happen early in the school year to account for inevitable delays.
By Mitchell McLarnon
Assistant Professor, Adult Education, Concordia University
The Conversation
August 4, 2022
Excerpt:
My findings contest claims that suggest community gardening is inherently an activity that reduces under-served communities’ food insecurity.
Reflecting on my efforts to grow food for organizations that work with people experiencing food insecurity, as part of a project called “Gardening for Food Security,” I cannot claim gardening helped to alleviate the concerns of people experiencing food insecurity in any quantifiable way.
This is despite producing an immense amount of food harvested on a weekly/bi-weekly basis from late June to early November in 2018 and 2019.
Although the gardens were thriving, the organization never reduced their food order to Montréal’s largest food bank. This may be because while participants ate from the garden harvest, their reliance upon it did not reduce their need for other food. The Gardening for Food Security project did, however, modestly support a food bank and a once-a-week meal service.
As we gardened and invested in gardens for different social, educational and environmental reasons in rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods, we contributed to increasing land values in a process described as green gentrification.
Despite these critical observations, some benefits of the project included:
offering relevant paid employment for young adults experiencing barriers to employment, food insecurity and homelessness;
providing mentorship and opportunities for under-served young adults and students to express themselves (through art, photography, music, film, gardening);
facilitating partnerships between schools and organizations with mandates of social and environmental justice for mutual benefit;
acquiring prolonged financial, learning and human resource support to educators, learners, community workers and community members, while developing ethical relationships and collaborating to accomplish shared objectives.
