Growing Together: Poverty Alleviation,Community Building,and Environmental Justice through Home Gardens in Pacoima,Los Angeles

Introduction

The environmental justice movement, while continuing to tackle challenges faced by communities of color disproportionately burdened by toxic pollution, has expanded to address other structural inequalities such as uneven access to green spaces, better access to fresh produce, transportation, and housing. ¹ Communities that have been disproportionately exposed to undesirable land uses are working to transform their communities into livable, green, and vibrant places. ² Increasing access to green space is a vital step towards creating more equitable and healthier environments. ³

The environmental justice and urban studies literatures have often pointed to building community gardens as a key strategy for communities that are interested in introducing green space in their neighborhoods. Community gardens provide much needed open space, improved access to fresh produce thereby improving nutrition, and are places for skill building and community activism. ⁴ However, little to no attention has been focused on home gardens as a way to achieve some of these same benefits, despite evidence that the adjacency of greenspace to one's home provides some of the greatest health benefits. ⁵ One of the few articles on home gardens found important positive psychological outcomes of home gardening such as improving family and neighbor relationships and connecting with nature. ⁶ A recent literature review found a dearth of research on home food gardens in the global North and looked to evidence in the global South to call for greater attention to this issue since home gardens make a greater contribution to urban food systems than do community gardens and can provide benefits beyond increasing access to fresh produce. ⁷

There are several barriers to building gardens in urban areas. One important concern is the prevalence of toxics such as lead in soil. This can be a crucial barrier to building either home or community gardens. Communities interested in promoting community gardens have relied on raised beds as an exposure reduction method. However, wind spreads pollution and raised beds were found to increase in lead concentration over years and must be consistently monitored. ⁸ Other challenges can include access to available land and purchasing inputs such as fertilizer. Despite these challenges, many communities choose to build gardens and in the context of our project site in Pacoima, families have been eager to build home gardens in their front or back yards.

The sustainable food movement literature examines ways that communities reestablish relationships that have been lost, to their food system and to their environment. ⁹ Environmental justice and food security literatures underscore the ways that immigrant communities bring cultural knowledge into their gardening practices in the United States, integrating long practiced methods into new gardens. ¹⁰ In Pacoima, building food gardens with low-income, primarily immigrant communities, community members often bring existing gardening knowledge gained in the face of scarcity in their home countries. This article examines data collected from the Grow Together Project, a program of Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND), an antipoverty organization located in Pacoima, Los Angeles, California. We report on data collected from a cohort of families that received home gardens in an ongoing program and find sufficient benefit to date at the individual, family, and community levels to warrant increased attention to home gardening in neighborhoods burdened with historical environmental injustice.

The Grow Together Project

Pacoima is located in the northern part of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, and is predominantly Latino, zoned light industrial with a mix of single family homes, higher density apartment complexes, and commercial and industrial corridors. Nearly 40% of the 97,000 residents live below the poverty line. Following World War II, Pacoima transitioned from an agricultural hub into a working class community, bringing blue collar, primarily African American workers who were attracted by manufacturing jobs to the area. Companies such as General Motors, Lockheed, and Price Pfister had factories in nearby Burbank and Glendale, a relatively short drive away on the 5 Freeway. By the 1960s, African American families began moving away to the edge suburbs of northern Los Angeles County while at the same time Mexican migrants, hoping to escape rural poverty, came to Pacoima to benefit from skilled blue collar jobs as gardeners, mechanics, and carpenters. By the 1990s, Pacoima experienced the local impacts of large scale deindustrialization and global economic restructuring when major manufacturers in the region closed local factories and moved jobs outside of the United States. ¹¹ Today, suburban planning has given way to near urban density with the trend of converting garages, backhouses, sheds, and trailers into rentable living spaces. In fact, 20% of the population of Pacoima lives in converted garages or rented rooms, creating an environment where severe poverty is interwoven into a lower middle class landscape and virtually hidden, making it difficult to access and address. ¹²

Pacoima is bordered by three freeways, hosts seven active landfills and factories that emit toxic pollution, and is considered park poor with limited green space of only two park acres per 1,000 residents. ¹³ Pacoima faces environmental challenges to community health such as poor air quality, lack of tree cover, and some of the hottest temperatures in Los Angeles where temperatures are predicted to increase as a result of a changing climate. ¹⁴ In the past several years, community organizations have sought to tackle these problems with new environmental and economic initiatives that are starting to transform Pacoima into a more sustainable place to live. The innovative Clean Up Green Up policy, passed in 2014, will establish green zones in three communities (Boyle Heights, Wilmington, and Pacoima) that face cumulative impacts from high pollution levels, poor land use, and environmental injustice. ¹⁵

MEND was established in 1971 as a poverty relief organization in 1971 to help families meet basic needs such as food and clothing. Over the years, MEND's services have expanded to provide free medical and dental care, literacy, job training, sewing, tutoring, and homeless services, so families can move out of poverty and achieve self-reliance. MEND is volunteer powered with nearly 5,200 volunteers and serves 38,500 to 49,000 poverty-level individuals each month. In Pacoima, 20% of adults suffer from obesity, adult rates of diabetes are at 10% of the population, 23% combat food insecurity, and tree cover sits at 12.4% of the land area versus 21% for Los Angeles County. ¹⁶ In 2013, MEND launched the Grow Together Project (GTP) to more holistically address problems of food insecurity, diabetes prevalence, obesity, and lack of green space and move towards systemic forms of poverty relief and greater food security by providing families with more autonomy over their food system and greater access to green spaces through gardening.

Methods

One hundred and twenty-seven families have been enrolled to date in the GTP. Cohort 1 was provided gardens in spring 2013 before the research component of the project began. This study reports on data collected from the second cohort of thirty-six families from receipt of garden through their first harvest, enrolled in fall 2013 (Cohort 2).

In order to participate in the program, families had to meet the following criteria: demonstrated financial need defined by family income near or below the poverty line, and all participating families were required to have children under the age of 18. The process of finding and selecting families was rigorous. A GTP staff member conducted outreach in the MEND lobby where families come for services, in school parent centers, and during MEND's diabetes clinic. Following an initial application, families attended an orientation that explained the program and related expectations and helped GTP staff gauge family interest. After the orientation, home visits were arranged where GTP staff surveyed the available space to determine if the outdoor area could successfully house a garden and determine whether the family had interest and time to fully participate. Then, eligible families received a garden and signed a commitment letter. Once the garden boxes were built for all 36 families, MEND held a “planting day,” and families all received their plants and started the growing season at the same time. “Mentor” visits were conducted by Master Gardeners and qualified volunteers to help identify and overcome any obstacles a family may encounter. All families receive a monthly newsletter with gardening tips and recipes to help ensure that the gardens are successful long term. When newsletters are returned or families don't arrive for a class, they are called or visited.

The program requires that one family member must attend four basic gardening classes that are taught using the Grow LA Victory Garden Initiative curriculum, a project of Los Angeles County that helps new gardeners start their own gardens. These classes are conducted by a Master Gardener and teach gardening basics such as plant structures, putting down seedlings, harvesting, and organic methods of fertilizing and controlling pests. The first two classes are administered prior to the receipt of the garden and the final two classes follow the first planting. GTP also offers voluntary enrichment workshops on cooking, canning, and composting. Participating families are also given fruit trees and tree care workshops as a way to increase their home food production and green space. Community building is a core focus of classes, harvest potlucks, and the “give back” requirement that all participants volunteer back into the program. Finally, families are asked to keep “harvest logs” whereby they tally produce which is then translated by GTP staff into dollar amounts to assess money saved on grocery bills.

We measured participation by percent attendance in mandatory classes and optional workshops. We documented service back to the program by participation in activities such as helping other families install gardens, community outreach, or donation of harvested produce to the MEND food bank. We designed a survey to measure qualitative outcomes for home garden recipients. One service option was to participate in the qualitative survey to examine potential influence of gardens on individuals and families. A quarter of families volunteered to participate in semi-structured interviews before receiving their gardens and following their first harvest. We asked questions in several subject areas including: social networks, physical activity, family needs, cultural identity, mental health, pride (in home and community), and access to nature. Interviews were conducted either in family homes or in MEND offices in both English and Spanish. Participants self-selected to participate in the survey so our qualitative data is limited by families that were available for interviews and potentially more enthusiastic about the gardens at the outset. Interviewees were almost entirely female and women were the primary caretakers of the gardens in most, though not all, families.

Results

We combine class participation, harvest logs, interviews, and service activities to gauge engagement in GTP. Families in our study identified as Latino (33), Caucasian (1), African American (1), and Asian (Filipino) (1).

Conclusion

The GTP has built 127 gardens to date. Of the families that joined the program, 116 families still have their gardens. Other families moved or could not keep them and 109 families continue to participate in the program. Home gardens provide both tangible and intangible benefits to families. Home food gardens can contribute to household food budgets, increase accessible green space, and provide health benefits such as physical activity through gardening, improved mental health, and greater access to fresh produce. We note added benefits such as the creation of leaders where home gardeners become program champions and community organizers, working to develop new groups of urban gardeners. Participants grew their social networks, felt more pride in their home spaces, and gardens could be places to express cultural identity. We also noted benefits we did not measure such as increased environmental awareness on issues such as water conservation.

Place attachment describes the positive bonds to physical and social settings that support identity, facilitate civic engagement, and contribute to neighborhood stability. ¹⁷ Home and community garden participation has been associated with neighborhood attachment and can be a step towards achieving these goals. ¹⁸ The GTP provides initial evidence into the potential benefits of home gardens in neighborhoods that have struggled with environmental injustice and provides particular insight into possibilities for immigrant communities to create new social networks and a sense of community ownership. We find overall positive outcomes from home gardens and hope to see additional research on home gardens that could increase support available for programs such as GTP while helping to develop strategies to address potential pitfalls. Neighborhoods such as Pacoima that have been fragmented by decades of disinvestment and environmental harm often must employ multiple strategies to move towards safer, healthier, and greener communities and home gardens can be one step towards achieving these goals.