Connecting to Communities
By Kymisha Montgomery, CGC Urban Agriculture Coordinator
When it comes to forging deep and lasting connections with communities, the people who are willing to give their most valuable resource—their time—to engage directly with members in the communities they serve are able to create great impact. Within our Urban Agriculture Program, we see the benefit of this kind of volunteering in our Community Garden Coordinators.
Community Garden Coordinators may be local food advocates, community stakeholders, faith leaders and educators who help support gardeners with their skills, thus increasing local food access and community health. They help us connect communities with resources and form bonds that help us address the challenges many of their neighbors may be facing. From serving on local food policy councils, to actively working on policies related to food access and sustainability, to increasing awareness of regenerative agriculture and the environmental impact of food choices—they are people who seek to improve the health of their communities and are able to use their resources and platform to champion and address local food challenges.
Our Community Garden Coordinators understand the CGC’s values of being inclusive, passionate, empowering, responsible and innovative, and they support our mission to build community through gardening, education and environmental stewardship in the Greater Cincinnati area. Bringing together a community of people that help support the diverse communities that we aid allows us to open the possibilities of providing critical education and other resources to help expand offerings of fresh, healthy food. Seventy percent of the community gardens in our network lie in neighborhoods where the environmental risks are high due to historical segregation and industrial legacies whose health risks are still present today. Working with the Coordinators of these gardens, we are able not only to address the lack of accessible healthy food, but also to educate on eco-friendly regenerative agricultural practices that holistically aid our most vulnerable communities.
We feel connected to our Coordinators. They provide invaluable support to our network by forming relationships with community members, which in turn allows us to achieve our mission. Throughout the year, the CGC tries to decrease some of the challenges associated with managing gardening spaces and being able to grow your own food by having three plant distributions and two seed distributions per year. At these events, we freely give out plant starts and other materials that Coordinators can share with their dedicated gardeners. We also offer two free agriculture-related development trainings and continued education opportunities throughout the year. After all, we couldn’t do what we do without them!