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BY SARAH POZGAY

In print | Published February 5, 2009

Swarthmore Environmental Justice, in collaboration with the Delaware County Alliance for Environmental Justice and the Chester Housing Authority, is taking steps to organize a plan for the construction of a community garden in Chester in the coming months. The project is to take place at Ruth L. Bennett Homes, Chester’s largest housing complex.

“[The project] addresses a lot of the key concerns of Chester,” Environmental Justice member Jenny Akchin ’10 said. Among these concerns are food availability and the community’s environmental well-being, all of which are exacerbated by underlying factors such as socioeconomic class.

“Often in attempts to solve environmental problems, there are elements of race and class that become obscured when they are actually really central to the environmental problems,” Scott Brainard ’09, one of the organizers behind the project, said. Environmental Justice hopes the garden will give residents the opportunity to take control of their own community in order to solve many of these issues. “I think a lot of it is about creating empowerment for the people themselves,” Uma Nagendra ’09, another member of the group, said. “A community garden is a way to do that.”

This is not the first time Swarthmore students have worked to address environmental issues in Chester. Eearlier projects, such as last year’s campaign against the creation of an additional industrial plant along the Chester Waterfront, have focused primarily on combating the threat of pollution. Though the group was successful in helping to prevent the new plant, members said they look forward to the garden project as a more positive way to institute environmental progress.

“Maintaining the status quo didn’t feel like as powerful a change as creating something new,” Environmental Justice member Kavita Hardy ’09 said.

Nagendra echoed Hardy’s attitude, emphasizing the significance of a project with such solid results.

“Creating a direct, tangible impact on people’s lives — that’s big,” she said.

Though the idea for the community garden has been in the works for some time, it is only now coming together through a collaboration between Environmental Justice, the Chester Housing Authority and the Delaware County Alliance for Environmental Justice, which the students worked with on last year’s anti-pollution campaign. Hardy said that Environmental Justice initiated the proposal for the garden independently, but as they pursued the project, found that they were not alone in their goals.

Indeed, support for the project goes outside even these organizations. “Swarthmore College, Teens 4 Good, the Chester Youth Consortium and the Chester Food Co-op have all expressed interest in supporting the project. It is hoped that others will join in once a degree of success is attained,” Executive Director of the Chester Housing Authority Steven Fischer said in an e-mail.

On a smaller level, the project relies on the collaboration between organizers, residents and volunteers.

“Residents will learn from each other the skills to plant. They will also benefit from the participation of the supporting groups’ business practices and how to maximize the potential of a community garden,” Fischer said. Workers from both Chester and the college plan to visit community gardens in Philadelphia in the coming weeks to learn together about what goes into creating a garden, Hardy added.

Although the group waits to hear a report this week gauging the residents’ response to the idea of the garden, what feedback they have received from the Chester community has been encouraging. “[There has been] a very positive response from the Resident Council,” Fischer said. “They believe there will be widespread enthusiasm from the greater community for this project.”

Community support for the garden is particularly imperative for the project’s future success.

Environmental Justice hopes to place responsibility for maintaining the garden directly in the community’s hands. “In the ideal situation, once we’ve got a group of residents who are really committed to making this garden their own … [maintaining the project] won’t be much of a problem,” Nagendra said.

Other members of the group echoed this hope. “Our role is in bringing resources to them but allowing them to determine the vision and direction they want to take it,” Hardy said.

“It’s very much about giving them ownership of the project,” Akchin said. “We really want to be able to step back and let them be autonomous.”

According to Brainard, the goal of self-sufficiency helps set the garden apart from many other Swarthmore student projects in the area. “Most projects taken on in Chester have a really short life span … when those students graduate, the projects go away as well,” he said. “[Environmental Justice] can be the impetus for this to start, but from the very beginning the project will be powered by the people who actually live there.”

However, giving Chester the reins to the project doesn’t necessarily mean Swarthmore students won’t be working with or through the garden in the months and years to come. Students in Swarthmore classes, such as Peter Collings’ Environmental Studies Capstone Seminar and Mark Wallace’s Religion and Ecology course, have demonstrated interest in contributing to the project through on-site research or volunteer work.

“Hopefully it will be a springboard for future projects in Chester,” Kae Kalwaic, an administrative assistant in the college’s Department of Education and a founding member of the Delaware County Alliance, said. According to Brainard, the location has the potential to accommodate related projects, such as a greenhouse. “The site is huge for an urban garden … There’s a lot of space for other projects to be going on side by side,” he said.

For the present, however, Environmental Justice has plenty on its plate organizing the garden project. Soon students will be meeting with the housing complex’s Resident Council to begin making more concrete decisions. The group hopes to host a panel discussion on community gardening soon and is also currently seeking tool and seed donations for the project, which is being partially funded by a Swarthmore Foundation grant.

Several members of the group will be giving a presentation on the project at an environmental education colloquium that is taking place in Philadelphia later this month through the Delaware County Alliance. “Through our presentation, we hope to shed light on the exploitation of Chester and demonstrate the steps we are taking to bring environmental justice to Chester,” Environmental Justice member Evan Nesterak ’09 said.

The group, which meets weekly on Thursdays at 8 p.m. in the Lang Center, plans to continue recruiting volunteers and spreading the word as the garden project progresses. “The more people who know about the project, the better,” Akchin said.

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