SOUTH-CENTRAL : NYC to Get Tips on Urban Gardening

A local community group that uses urban gardening to get youths off the streets and into jobs has been selected to pass along its trade secrets to similar organizations in New York City.

Hope LA Horticulture Corps recently received a $3,000 grant to teach three New York-based community organizations the particulars of “urban agri-forestry.” It is a program hailed as groundbreaking by proponents because it not only provides job training and self-esteem building but also eventually pays for itself through the sale of cash crops grown at project gardens.

For Hope LA founder George Singleton, the Kellogg Foundation grant is confirmation that his group “is on the right track.”

“We have a model that can be transferred to every inner city in the country,” the 46-year-old herbalist said. The grant was part of the foundation’s efforts to encourage dialogue and program sharing among community service groups.

Singleton has already visited New York once to introduce his concept at a workshop, and he plans to return in the summer to put the idea into practice.

Meanwhile in New York, program directors with the target agencies have begun making room in their programs for self-sustaining urban agriculture.

“We’re talking about using it for our youth program and to help in neighborhood revitalization projects,” said Yaw Vilmer with the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Assn., one of the groups Singleton visited in December.

Hope LA is a subsidiary of South-Central Los Angeles-based BRCA Inc., a private, nonprofit economic development corporation. Money for the program comes primarily from profits from BRCA’s cracker and cookie factory and a yearly fund-raising concert at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.

Since 1990, Hope LA has operated a teaching garden on a former vacant lot at John Hope Continuation High School. Once choked with weeds, the two-acre site now sprouts collard greens, turnips, fruit trees and highly coveted Paulownia trees.

Singleton hopes to defray the cost of the program over the next several years by harvesting the Paulownias and selling them for $1,000 per cubic meter. The wood is highly prized by the Japanese furniture and toy industries, he said. Other crops grown at the garden will also be sold.

In addition, roughly 30 young men and women have earned part-time pay watering, pulling weeds and otherwise tending the program’s verdant “micro-farm” smack in the middle of the concrete and stucco of an aging urban neighborhood.

With that experience, many trainees have gone on to get jobs in landscaping, greenhouse care and other horticulture-related jobs.

Gerardo Gutierrez, 19, who works as a landscaper with the city Department of Water and Power, says he owes his job to Hope LA.

From working in the garden for a year, Gutierrez gained enough know-how to get a job mowing lawns and trimming bushes at DWP facilities across the city. The position is only part time, but Gutierrez hopes eventually to turn it into full-time work.

If not for Hope LA, the teen said, he would probably “be out on the streets hanging out.”

The garden at the continuation high school is different than most, Singleton said, because he uses the ancient Egyptian and Native American practice of digging seed beds two feet deep rather than the standard 8 to 12 inches.

This allows four times as many plants to be grown, he said, requiring half as much water while maximizing cash-crop output on scarce urban land.

That prospect was one of the reasons the Banana Kelly program was drawn to Singleton’s idea, said Joe Hall, director of community enrichment services for the agency, based in a Bronx neighborhood.

“We’re a community development corporation, and his program model has gotten us to thinking about micro-enterprises with an environmental slant,” Hall said.

Singleton’s group hopes to establish other “agri-forests” in Los Angeles, including one in the Jordan Downs public housing project and another at Southwest College.

“We hope it will connect the young people with nature and ground them in a work ethic,” he said.