No Backyard Left Behind
How a Denver-based program is re-visioning resilience one garden at a time.
“Every person has the ability to become an agent for creating a better world — all it takes is planting seeds of awareness, and nurturing through intentionally caring and investing in one person and one community at a time.” -Revision International
That is the cornerstone upon which Revision International is built.
In 2009, Eric Kornacki and Joseph Teipel launched an initiative called Re:Farm Denver, to address the absence of accessible and affordable food in the Westwood neighborhood — a Hispanic neighborhood, considered a food desert and deemed “endangered” by the city. They piloted the program with just seven backyard gardens.
The story began two years previous as the seeds of a new economy were planted on a fated trip to Nicaragua for a service-learning project where Kornacki and Teipel met. The vision was watered by the desire to create a new approach to community development that values relationships between people, the community, and the natural landscape. Their primary motivation was to not follow the common mistake of many development projects — providing unsustainable solutions from outside of the community.
While their vision to make a large impact remains, they made the decision in 2008 to work more intensively on a hyper-local level and address the needs of one specific community. They have developed a holistic approach to create a sustainable and self-sufficient community by re-localizing and rebuilding a local food system within the existing infrastructure.
Five years later, they’ve now implemented 200 backyard gardens in the small community and this year they’re pushing for 300. They now have two urban farms as well — one assists 40 Somali Bantu refugee families and the other serves as an educational farm. They’ve built up a successful promotora program to train up leaders from within the community. And the coming year offers even more promise as they’ve received a grant to open the Westwood Food Hub — the first Co-op in Denver.
Seed by seed they’re growing self-sufficient communities from the ground up!
Originally posted on Barnraiser.us
