Breaking Ground: NorCal Resilience Lends its Support to a Vibrant Community Garden at the Dream Youth Clinic

by Emma Centeno | Aug 6, 2020 | Food, Resilience Hubs

Photographs by David Monical

NorCal Resilience Network is launching a crowdfunder campaign in the coming few days. Stay tuned to donate to our campaign, which will provide direct support to BIPOC-led, on-the-ground projects. This article illustrates an inspiring example of the kinds of projects that we have supported,  and will continue to support through the crowd funding campaign.

Volunteers Create a Community Garden and Clinic for Youth with the Dream Youth Clinic

On July 27th, about 15 volunteers, wearing masks and socially distanced from each other, sweated away  on a cul de sac in Downtown Oakland to clear out old garden beds to make way for fresh soil and new life. They spent the afternoon clearing debris, pulling weeds and disposing of trash, and emptying the garden beds filled with unwanted gravel and dirt to make way for a future community garden and outdoor clinic. Behind them, a vibrant mural with hopeful visions of community members and hearts had been painted, a beautiful sight to look at. 

A beautiful display of the power of the NorCal Resilience Network, this was one of the Dream Youth Clinic’s work parties for their future community garden and outdoor clinic. The volunteers heralded from various organizations around the Bay Area – including Tract Trust, Green Life and PLACE for Sustainable Living–all Network members–and were working to prepare the land for the garden, which would soon be as beautiful as the mural behind it. They enjoyed smoothies from Network collaborator Essential Food and Medicine and made valuable work connections and new friendships. NorCal Resilience supported the project with two mini-grants.

Dream Youth Clinic, a youth site of Roots Community Health Center, is a youth-led, youth-empowered health clinic, co-located within the Dreamcatcher and Covenant House Youth Shelters; and one of NorCal Resilience Network’s collaborating Resilience Hubs. They offer free medical care to vulnerable youth in Oakland and the Greater Bay Area. Many of its clients often have had experiences with family violence, food insecurity, and/or sexual abuse or exploitation. Creating a peaceful space in the community is exactly what the Dream Youth Clinic has been accomplishing. 

The goal of the garden/outdoor clinic is youth-led and will integrate the youth in the design and execution of the garden, making it a space created for them and by youth. 

According to director Dr. Aisha Mays, it has been a dream of hers to create a garden, noting that in the past, their desolate surroundings promoted inadequate nutrition, isolation, and poor health outcomes in clients– she knew a garden that would also serve as their outdoor clinic would help to combat these issues and improve health. In April 2019, the Clinic had its first visioning focus group where youth were asked how they would like the garden to be created. They were asked, “If we were to build a garden here, what do you see in this garden? How does it make your body feel?” One individual remarked:

“Being in touch with my emotions and thoughts without someone else telling me to do it. Peaceful & community-like. Makes me feel safe. There’s not a lot of other spaces that make me safe or free to say and do things I need to do to feel like myself. Inner peace. Patience with myself. Letting go of all the emotions that I had built.”

Receiving seed funding from two NorCal Resilience Network mini-grants, the Chase Center, Planting Justice, and other foundations, the Dream Youth Clinic is starting to put its project of building a community garden and outdoor clinic into motion. To create a safe space to reconnect with nature, as desired by the focus group, the Dream Youth Clinic incorporated help from experts at Planting Justice to plan the Urban Garden Clinic. This clinic is planned to be a wellness place immersed in the garden with the intent of providing a unique juxtaposition of the clinic with fresh, nutritious food and a peaceful, aesthetic green space that can improve overall health outcomes for adolescents. Workshops at the garden will be conducted by local community members and will inform youth volunteers on topics including seedling development, plant medicine, medicinal gardens, soil health, and food as medicine.

Part of the grant money will be used to design and construct a water catchment gazebo to collect and store up to 250 gallons of rainwater. Prioritizing Black builders, the clinic will be hiring community members to construct the gazebo from sustainable and repurposed materials. 

The Dream Youth Clinic received a second grant from NorCal Resilience recently. This money will be used to pay stipends to the youth for working in the garden and community members for providing education and eco-friendly smoothies, and purchase vegetable starts and fruit trees to start growing produce. The Dream Youth Clinic finally broke ground on this project in July with the garden work day; after months of planning, Dr. Mays’ dream of a community garden and in Downtown Oakland is materializing. 

“We so appreciate the support of NorCal Resilience Network and love being one of the Resilience Hubs. We hope that the Network will join us in the fall once again after the garden has been planted, to celebrate our “grand opening,” commented Project Director Deb Levine. 

As mentioned above, the NorCal Resilience Network is launching a crowdfunder campaign to support Resilience Hubs including the Dream Youth Clinic. It is imperative to invest in grassroots projects, resilience hubs, and people-powered regenerative solutions, led by and for BIPOC communities, to combat the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental injustices, systemic racism, and other inequities in communities. Please stay tuned to find out how you can donate!