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Homeless Garden Project one step closer to a permanent home in Pogonip

Between 2013 and 2020, 97% of trainees found steady income after graduating, Ganzhorn said. And in the same period, 90% of graduates found housing.

By Hanna Merzbach
Lookout Santa Cruz
Oct 1, 2021

Excerpt:

For nearly 30 years, the Homeless Garden Project has provided job training, transitional employment and support services to unhoused individuals on a 3.5-acre farm near Natural Bridges State Beach — but it was never supposed to stay there that long.

“Our move to Pogonip has certainly taken much longer than we ever imagined,” the Homeless Garden Project’s executive director, Darrie Ganzhorn, told Lookout via email.

In 1998, the city’s Pogonip Master Plan envisioned a permanent site for the organic farm in the area’s lower meadow, off of Golf Club Drive, and the organization has been working toward that goal since launching a $3.5 million campaign in 2016 to fund the Pogonip farm. By 2019, the nonprofit had a lease from the city, a design permit and had reached its fundraising goal, but the city hit the brakes on the whole process in mid-2019 when it discovered environmental contamination on the site.

Pogonip, home to a clubhouse throughout the 20th century, was once popular for skeet shooting, which left lead in the soil. Now, the city says only 4.5 acres of the land are safe for farming, compared to the nearly 10 acres that was previously set aside for the Homeless Garden Project’s farm.

Read the complete article here.