Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) is working to connect people to urban gardens and food forests throughout the United States. With their recent Urban Garden Project, they are looking to connect community gardens across the country while providing resources and administrative support.
The Urban Garden Project aims to create a playbook to help organizations establish and operate community gardens. This includes guidance for back-office management, leadership structures, inclusion and belonging, logistics for garden creation and land use and more.
Project organizers hope to change the perception of community gardens so that they are considered essential resources. Research published by the National Library of Medicine demonstrates that community gardens enhance nutrition and physical activity, promote the importance of public health and create spaces that spark opportunities to organize around other issues and connect as a community.
Project goals also include uniting people dedicated to creating and managing gardens, and providing funding and resources for garden projects.
“Every garden has its own bylaws, every garden has its own operating system. And it’s like, that’s a lot to ask, right? That’s a lot to ask of somebody who is in this because they’re gardeners,” Linda Appel Lipsius, Executive Director of DUG tells Food Tank.
According to a survey of community gardens in Canada and the United States published in Agriculture and Human Values, the most common barriers to starting and operating community gardens are lack of funding, participation, land and materials.
Appel Lipsius also explains that even while community gardens are becoming more widespread, they require a lot of administrative work. This is something that many people don’t realize, she says, which can cause them to become neglected or fall into a state of disrepair.
DUG can help these community gardens by drawing on its experience operating 200 garden sites across the Metro Denver area. Appel Lipsius says the administrative management is handled by the central DUG office and is not the responsibility of garden leaders—and it allows them to focus on running the gardens instead of managing issues like securing funding and land rights.
Although the Urban Garden Project is still in its early stages, Appel Lipsius tells Food Tank that it may take many different forms depending on the needs of other community garden organizations. It may ultimately evolve into a consulting operation, an association of organizations, or even take an entirely different approach.
“I think with some support, we can just really help uplift all these organizations,” Appel Lipsius says.
Before launching the Urban Garden Project, Appel Lipsius says DUG regularly received calls from other organizations asking for help setting up different programs and managing operations.
“I think there’s been, institutionally for a long time, an interest in [asking] how can we be of greater help?” Appel Lipsius tells Food Tank.
In addition to community garden work, DUG also is also working to establish food forests across the Metro Denver area. These community green spaces are designed to mimic the natural ecosystem of a forest through multiple layers of edible plants.
Food forests can produce fresh food for eaters, provide wildlife habitat, and connect communities to nature, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports. They also tend to be publicly accessible, according to the Natural Capital Project of Stanford University, and designed and planted by community groups or local government entities.
At DUG, small teams of Tree Keepers—volunteers who monitor and maintain the sites—manage the forests. Appel Lipsius shares that the food forests are designed so that produce is first available to the community. But DUG also plans to partner with gleaning organizations and food banks to collect any food that is not collected by the community so that nothing goes to waste.
Appel Lipsius sees the food forests complementing DUG’s other projects, because these public spaces reach people who might not be engaged with community gardens.
“Gardens are rinse and repeat every year, and this is just sort of a sustained legacy project. It attracts different people, which is also really great because we know that not everybody’s a gardener.”
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Photo courtesy of Jonathan Kemper, Unsplash
