The garden you are looking at is a miniature version of the one-acre Marvin Gaye Community Greening Center, a model farm created by Washington Parks & People 15 years ago to grow healthy community food, learning, jobs, healing, arts and culture, peace, and environmental justice in long-forgotten neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.
Set in the community where Marvin Gaye had his professional debut as a teen growing up here, the Greening Center produces over 5,000 pounds of produce each year, growing food year-round in four 80-foot hoop houses as well as sprawling permanent food forests of figs, apples, peaches, pears, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and native serviceberries. A national demonstration site for urban agroforestry, the Greening Center has been a hub of community reforestation and green job training through Parks & People’s DC Green Corps, which has now graduated 260 adults from its park-based workforce program, together with thousands of youth service learners for whom the Greening Center has been a gateway to opportunities for community learning and leadership in the outdoors.
The installation in front of you includes many of the key elements of the Greening Center, including the ancient stream that runs past us, the agroecology and healing crops that we grow, and the community art that weaves through and tells some of the story of the place. The youth art works, produced by our award-winning partners at Life Pieces To Masterpieces, include several pieces that show the power of the Greening Center during the time of the COVID pandemic. At a time when all of DC’s schools, rec centers, and parks were closed, Parks & People never closed the Greening Center or any of the outdoor spaces we serve across DC. When the neighborhood youth in the Life Pieces program had nowhere to go outside to learn and play, we invited them into the Greening Center, which became their classroom, their playground, and their little piece of heaven for the remainder of the pandemic.
Life Pieces’ signature art process involves its program participants channeling their life experiences through acrylic-painted scraps of canvas sewn into colorful collages. Older youth serve as mentors to younger peers, guiding them through discussions and preliminary sketches based on their shared experiences. They then work together to paint, cut, and sew scraps of canvas into a cohesive piece, while writing an accompanying story or poem. Each artwork serves as a metaphor for sewing their “life pieces” into “masterpieces.” The artwork created by LPTM’s participants portrays a wide range of representation of Black American males from their own perspectives, and their pandemic artwork created outside in the garden reflects the deep transformation they felt in being able to freely plant, play, harvest, and connect with nature and each other in that deeply difficult time. (For more information on Life Pieces To Masterpieces and its arts-based mentoring, visit lifepieces.org.)
Today, the Greening Center hosts all kinds of arts, healing, nature, and healthy food programs throughout the year– farm markets, harvest days, yoga and healing classes, concerts, arts and cultural exhibitions, and community programming of all kinds tied to the wider Marvin Gaye Park corridor. Please come visit!
Parks & People and the Greening Center welcome volunteers and support of all kinds. For more information, contact us at [email protected].
Community Harvest
The Community Harvest Program serves to reconnect our most vulnerable communities back to the land, advancing our urban farms, parks, and other greenspaces as a vital mechanism for providing various types of culturally relevant programming such as nutrition and cooking classes, environmental stewardship job trainings, safe gathering spaces for advocacy and change, after-school youth programs while also providing fresh and organic produce to low income families.
Community Harvest is designed to be a working model for city-wide efforts in our Think Outside initiative, which seeks to help meet critical human and environmental needs by reconnecting DC’s two greatest but most forgotten assets: our vast network of public green spaces, the highest percentage of any major city in North America, and our deep base of people and communities who care. Parks & People’s own urban agriculture sites, the Marvin Gaye Greening Center and the Columbia Heights Green, provide year-round healthy food and programming opportunities for public land reclamation, green planning and design, arts and cultural events, job training, volunteer support, and advocacy for community greening efforts.
Seedbeds of Change
At the Greening Center, Parks & People and our many community partners conduct year-round intensive permaculture farming of sustainable organic healthy food while providing a base of workforce development and learning for people of all ages about farming, environmental reclamation, and land stewardship. At the Green, Parks & People has transformed our community garden into a mini-farm – where instead of assigned individual garden plots, the entire site is community-grown and harvested. This communal approach produces a much higher quantity and quality of food. Over half of all food produced is donated to Sacred Heart and Martha’s Table, a homeless services agency whose clients are now at the center of the team tending the Green. In 2020, both the Green and the Greening Center will open on-site farm kitchens to provide food preparation and nutrition demonstrations.
Farm to Table
Through connection with the Riverside Healthy Living Center around the corner from the Greening Center, Parks & People is developing DC’s first comprehensive Healthy Food Hub. A model of full-circle food production, preparation, distribution and consumption is enabled through the incubation of seedlings at Riverside as well as the use of Riverside’s newly renovated commercial kitchen, café and community hall as a site for healthy cooking classes, catering, and other food-based enterprise.
Interested in joining Parks & People’s Community Harvest Network? Call us at 202-462-7275.
Visit our list of Farmers Markets in DC, Virginia, and Maryland to find a Farmers Market near you!
Additional Community Harvest Resources