Reorienting Bartram’s Garden
A decade’s long journey to place driving equity
This is the first in a series of stories inspired by Place Driving Equity: An evidence-based action guide on the role of public space for shared prosperity. This new publication highlights public policies and actions communities can use to deliver shared prosperity through investments in public space, and shares examples of what’s working well in cities around the U.S.
The public spaces where people come together to live, work, learn and socialize are among the most important drivers of equity and prosperity in communities. From parks to paths to libraries, these places shape everything from mental and physical health to economic opportunity and success.
As Place Driving Equity: An evidence-based action guide on the role of public space for shared prosperity articulates, inequity in place fosters a world where some enjoy the opportunities offered by a robust, nature-rich public realm, while others suffer from long-standing disinvestment. There has always been inequity in the quality and quantity of public spaces across American communities, but the compounding crises in 2020 and 2021 brought on by COVID-19 and civil unrest in response to persistent police brutality and racism have further magnified it.
Today, as communities turn increasing attention to infrastructure and recovery, there is an urgent and unprecedented opportunity for practitioners, policymakers and funders to invest in public spaces as a means of centering equity and supporting shared prosperity. Investing in the public realm can be a catalyst for long-term change in communities that have suffered from systemic racism, disinvestment, devaluation and stigma.
Many communities are already seeing the impact of these kinds of investments. From local hiring to intentional relationship building to programming that responds to the local community’s interests and needs, practitioners across the country are setting examples of how to reverse harmful long standing trends. In Philadelphia, the team at Bartram’s Garden has taken a layered approach over the past 10 years, driving equity in a variety of ways including through programs that prioritize nearby neighbors.
A new legacy for a historic botanic garden
Bartram’s Garden is the oldest botanic garden in North America, located along the Schuylkill River in Southwest Philadelphia, a predominantly Black neighborhood. The garden is a public park with a long history of providing horticultural education and protecting, preserving and sharing the legacy of the Bartram family who created it. The garden welcomed many visitors, but few were from within the neighborhood.
In 2012, new leadership decided to shift the garden’s focus. Rather than functioning solely as an educational place, Bartram’s Garden would become a place that encouraged experience. Importantly, the team made an intentional commitment to build and heal relationships with neighbors — to become the “backyard” for Southwest Philadelphia.
Achieving this transformation would mean changing how the organization used resources, made decisions and shared the garden’s extraordinary, historic space. Garden staff would work to build trust while inviting diversity at the garden. And they would change their programming to be more interesting and inviting to local neighbors. In 2013, Bartram’s Garden received support for its new mission: a grant from the William Penn Foundation to grow organizational capacity, community outreach and river-related education and programming.
Listening and learning, locally
To begin building trust with neighbors, the Garden team started at Bartram Village, a housing development right next door. The team met with the community’s resident council, and they created the Southwest Community Leadership Council, to focus on bringing together people actively involved in the local community to share perspectives on how to make the garden more inviting and meaningful for people living nearby.
The Garden’s staff listened to residents and created programming based on their ideas. Early on, they started an Easter egg hunt and held movie nights that, although open to anyone, were only advertised in Bartram Village — the neighborhood immediately adjacent to the Garden. These ideas came from the early listening sessions with residents. The Garden also lowered the cost of tickets to tours, events and other programs to just $2 for Southwest Philadelphia residents and those with Pennsylvania’s ACCESS card (which provides card holders with Cash Assistance, SNAP and Medical Assistance benefits).
Today, programming ideas often come from community members. Garden staff are in the habit of saying “yes” whenever they can, while also being clear about what is not feasible. Recently, a local artist worked with the Garden team on an urban medicine workshop. The event was so successful, it became a regular and ongoing seasonal offering at the Garden — hosting multiple workshops throughout the year.
“The arts and culture program shifted. We had been curating the program, then we started talking about not really curating anything at all,” said Aseel Rasheed, Director of Public Programs at Bartram’s Garden. “People would show up and tell us they had a skill and ask if they could share it. And we’d always say yes. So the arts and culture program now facilitates what comes to us.”
The Garden team changed the way they told the history of the site and the community it is part of — in particular, the area’s rich Black history, inviting neighbors to help tell the story.
“No one came and said we should change the history we were telling, but we all thought we should change it,” said Aseel. “So, we made the decision but invited other people in to help and contribute their voices.”
Transforming from the inside out
While building relationships with the local community, Bartram’s Garden added new staff and prioritized diversity in hiring, creating an internal culture of supporting programs that were inviting and interesting to neighbors and that would welcome a diverse range of new visitors to the garden.
“If you want to see a diverse audience, then you have to have a diverse staff,” said Aseel. “If you want to engage different cultures and perspectives, then you have to come to it with different cultures and perspectives. We haven’t always had that, but that’s slowly changing.”
Over 10 years, the Garden’s staff has grown from 8 people to nearly 40 plus 50 youth interns, with many coming from the local community. The team is encouraged to express what they are passionate about, and because of the Garden’s entrepreneurial approach to program development, team members are supported to explore their ideas and provided resources to bring new programs to life.
This approach has changed the experience of Bartram’s Garden. Visitors have lots of options for learning, exploring and getting involved, from more arts and culture programming to an array of youth development programs. There’s also an updated visitors’ center and a lively, fun brochure created by a local artist.
Building connection in a big way
As part of the transformation, the Garden has created and grown larger-scale programs that build opportunities for connecting visitors with the natural environment and fostering meaningful change for local communities. These include a river program and Sankofa Community Farm.
The river program started as a small-scale community boating program on the banks of the Schuylkill River. A woman with family roots in Southwest who had been organizing a parade on the tidal portion of the river wanted to help people physically get out on the water. Together, she and the Garden team organized Saturday events where people could go out on the water in kayaks as a regularly occurring activity. The program quickly became popular, growing to attract more than 6,000 people to Saturday events in a single year and drawing more than 100 volunteers.
Recognizing a strong interest in the river and its importance to community life, the Garden team has evolved and expanded opportunities along the river.
Along the way, the team learned that many local community members were fishing in the river, and they built a fishing program in response. Public fishing is a regular event at the Garden now, focused mainly on a local audience, that often connects new anglers to those who have been fishing here for many years. During the pandemic, a live bait machine was installed to support local fishing even when staff were not available. The Garden has also engaged the local community in a water quality monitoring program, inviting neighbors to record data and hosting conversations about advocacy to protect the river.
Sankofa Community Farm is an African diaspora-focused community farm, orchard and community garden. Sankofa employs roughly 20 paid local high school interns through its youth program, produces and distributes over 15,000 pounds of food each year, works with over 50 local families in its community garden and more. Building off the success of Sankofa Community Farm’s award-winning youth leadership program, the Garden has established a parallel river-focused youth development program in which high school students learn about the local watershed, cultural connections to water, river safety and more.
Southwest Philadelphia’s backyard
After a decade of change, today, Bartram’s Garden prioritizes nearby neighbors while continuing to serve as a regional destination.
The impact of this layered approach to change is clear in polls of nearby residents and visitors. Before its transformation many local community members thought the Garden was a private site, not open to the public. But by 2017, 80 percent of nearby residents indicated they’d visited the Garden within the past year. And over 95 percent said they felt welcome. In addition, a 2017 survey found that more than a quarter of Garden visitors were from Southwest Philadelphia, and nearly half of all visitors identified as African American. A followup survey is in the works now, but the staff is confident that the pandemic led to more local visitorship during the past two years than ever before.
As the Garden team looks toward the future, they plan to continue building connections with the local community through a range of opportunities, from new trail connections to an ecosystems education center with the world’s first production-scale hatchery for freshwater mussels. “The common ground is this space, it’s this land,” said Aseel. “What we have been asking ourselves is: What kind of relationship can we have that’s in service both to this place and to the people who want to come to it?”
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
