Since last summer I’ve been focused on growing community, connection, health and healing, and all through one activity: Growing food! I was taught, and then helped teach community garden leaders, about growing healthy fruit trees. I joined the board of my neighborhood healthy local food source, The Riverwest Food Co-op, which has been struggling to find a valued role within a traditional food system that breeds lack of health and choice. I’ve become an active learner and volunteer at my local community garden which is a non-profit organization, Victory Garden Initiative. I have helped design and lead a gardening camp for over 20 Milwaukee afterschool youth ages 7-15, led a volunteer drive with over 300 volunteers, and have connected the produce from the garden with local entrepreneurs with food-based businesses.

I am doing all of this because I see how a community engaged in producing its own food on land it collectively controls also produces something else. Healthy community. Which produces connection and healthy lifestyle choices. And it also produces a very important condition, or state of being, in those who have the opportunity to allow themselves to get lost in the wonder, the work, and the dirt of a garden. And that is…calm. Calm is feeling present and grounded, feeling awe and wonder, feeling natural tactile sensations, and tasting and smelling beautiful tastes and smells. And experiencing joy. These are all of the things we strive to produce experientially in a trauma-informed afterschool program!

I suspect that I am about to embark on a journey to infuse afterschool programs and schools and the neighborhoods they are in, in collective, community gardening, as a trauma intervention, as a way to build community, and as a way to improve community and individual health.

Ready to grow?