While gardening in community and school gardens is known to have many health, wellness, and educational benefits, it's important to understand that these benefits don't magically appear once the gardens are established.
For the past six years, I have worked closely with Thio'tia:ke/Montreal teachers, community workers, activists, and community members to create, fund, and support park and garden groups in schools and community organizations.
We are organizing in-house adult learning to provide practical support for gardening and learning, and to explore the extent to which gardens serve as forums for people to speak up about social and environmental justice. Some participants faced barriers at work, food insecurity and homelessness.
This research and community work has demonstrated the importance of advocating for wider social, urban and educational change, of supporting horticulture to support the community garden, and of understanding the importance of having realistic expectations of what people can achieve in and out of gardens.
Who benefits?In Thio'tia: ke/Montreal, community gardening is implemented in several ways, including gardening efforts in community organizations and city parks.
There are long lines across the city to get into the parks, exacerbated by public parks that have historically been reserved for private property owners.
According to the Mayor of Montreal, “For many people, community gardens are more than just a hobby. They allow them to feed their families and get fresh food at a low cost.
Such claims obscure more complex questions about who can control and access public parks and mask deep social inequalities in land rights in a settler colonial society that encourages property, whiteness, and hierarchical patterns of relationships.
Link to food insecurityThe My Conclusion contest states that community gardening is, by its very nature, an activity that reduces food security.
With a project called Gardening for Food Security, I reflect on my efforts to grow food for organizations that work with food insecure people, and I cannot say that gardening has helped in any way to solve people's problems, not provided with food.
This is despite significant amounts of food being produced weekly/fortnightly in 2018 and 2019 from late June to early November.
Although the gardens flourished, the organization never stopped ordering food from Montreal's largest food bank. This may be because although the participants ate horticultural crops, their dependence on them did not reduce their need for other foods. However, the Gardening for Food Security project sponsored a once-a-week food bank and food service.
Mixed effects on societies and individualsBy creating and investing in parks for various social, educational and environmental reasons in areas that are rapidly improving, we have helped increase the value of land in a process known as green gentrification.
Despite these criticisms, some of the advantages of the project are:
It is difficult for sponsors to identify the last three types of benefits.
Video created in collaboration with members of the Gardening for Food Security team, with music by one of the team members, Sven "7ven" Kruse. Problems with the school gardenHorticulture as part of environmental education is not a required core curriculum in Quebec. School gardening is usually done outside school hours, during lunch breaks, or outside of school. Taken together, organizing gardening classes for students in most public schools adds extra work to teachers who are already overwhelmed and under-supported.
For gardening to have meaning and educational value for both teachers and students, gardens must be included in all major areas of study (French, English, Mathematics, etc.) and not just used before or after school or during lunch.
Some of my colleagues have said that they are very involved and interested in creating an educational gardening experience for their students. But obtaining permits is associated with administrative work. This can affect the organization of other important aspects of setting up a garden, such as generating funding, building relationships with colleagues, establishing educational connections, etc.
Small social changesThio'tiac/Montreal, like many cities in Canada, has long winters and short summers. For school gardens to function, planning and administrative work, as well as spring permits for gardens, must occur at the start of the school year to allow for inevitable delays.
If teachers or outsiders want to support the school gardens with money and labor, I strongly encourage students to take the lead in the creation and development of the garden and, most importantly, value the garden as a project.
When gardens are praised for expected outcomes such as health, well-being and food security, without a better understanding of how systemic barriers affect these complex issues, there is much to lose.
These include the welfare of teachers working hard for what they believe in with limited institutional support, and affordable housing for people who have lost their homes, communities and networks to green gentrification.
There is no easy solutionThere are no easy solutions to the social and environmental problems of schools, gardening or landscaping.
Teachers and community members often want and need a garden, but they need more: financial support, support for learning, support for human resources, more time, fewer students, freedom to learn, adequate professional development, and land that is not part of a larger capital. . The system is privately owned or limited by the bureaucracy.
Even small changes in society take time and constant team effort.
Mitchell McLarnon, Associate Professor of Adult Education, Concordia University
This article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
