by Kris Gallagher
Butted up against a railroad embankment on Chicago’s South Side, a hoop house shelters seedlings that will provide fresh produce well into November. Monarch butterflies flutter among prairie plants before beginning their fall migration. Chickens and ducks squawk insistently to be let out of their overnight shelter.
This is Eden Place Nature Center, a mile south of the White Sox stadium and just west of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Fuller Park. Surrounded by aging homes, vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, Eden Place used to be a construction dump, contaminated with lead paint and asbestos.
“[Eden Place is] this incredibly beautiful, picturesque place, an oasis in the city, where people who typically don’t have access to that kind of natural beauty are able to just fully immerse themselves in three and a half acres,” says Barb Willard, associate professor of environmental science and communication. For years she included the site in her Discover Chicago class, Chicago Wilderness. She recently became more involved when founders Michael and Amelia Howard and their family added a community garden to Eden Place.
“They have to do raised-bed gardening because lead, of course, is a huge problem all over the city, but especially there,” she says. Like most gardens on small city lots, it also has to be organic and sustainable, which is labor intensive. “They just don’t have the labor.”
Enter the students in Willard’s Urban Agriculture class. They do soil analysis, experiment with plant types, convert old windows into cold-frame greenhouses–and they dig, build, plant and weed.
“With almost 30 people, three hours a week for everyone for 10 weeks, we’re going to get so much done here,” says Emily Leidenfrost, a senior studying environmental science and Spanish. Because her career goal is to provide environmental education to Latino communities, the course gives her valuable hands-on experience. “It’s cool to work with communities, teaching them about gardening and all about the soil and the earth and the nutrition that is associated with eating vegetables and fruit and fresh produce.”
Research in the Community
That’s the logical outcome of the work already done by Howard Rosing, director of DePaul’s Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning, and faculty members who teach related service-learning courses.
“For the last decade I’ve been doing research with students, in my own courses, but also with other [faculty members], on behalf of community-based organizations around the issue of food access in Chicago neighborhoods, especially those that don’t have supermarkets,” Rosing says. Students began documenting the problem by canvassing neighborhood stores and interviewing residents “to really understand what foods were available, especially things like produce … and other perishables.”
While some students gather data, others use geographic information system (GIS) tools for mapping food access as well as community gardens, says Sungsoon Hwang, assistant professor of geography. The service-learning projects enable her to demonstrate the impact of geographic studies in addition to supporting organizations, such as the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.
“The cultural center is using a community garden as an umbrella approach to addressing community problems. It can use the garden to help promote health, economic development and environmental protection, as well as provide educational opportunities,” she says. “Students can observe how pillars of sustainability unfold as a whole in the local community by conducting a community GIS project.”
Student research was pivotal in convincing community leaders in Evanston to reverse a ban on residents keeping backyard chickens, says Hugh Bartling, associate professor of public policy. His students interviewed municipal leaders across the country about the impact of allowing urban dwellers to keep a few chickens in their yard. Their research was used to draft Evanston’s new ordinance and gain support. Now Bartling receives a steady stream of inquiries from other communities about the research, which he plans to include in his upcoming paper on poultry regulations in cities.
Vision for a “Food Network”
Along with Rosing and Hwang, Willard wants to “harness all these silos of activism” and better coordinate DePaul’s involvement in community gardens, building on Chicago’s new ordinance that makes community gardens easier to establish. Operating on the belief that DePaul and its students can have the greatest impact by providing critical support during the first three years of new community gardens, the Steans Center is conducting a garden inventory and launching pilot projects in four neighborhoods of Chicago.
“The idea is to create a community food systems initiative that channels projects from various disciplines–everything from environmental science to commerce and computer science to the law school,” Rosing says. “[The gardens] need people to help, and the students get out, exposed to what’s going on in these neighborhoods where there’s not a lot of access.”
DePaul is ideally positioned to lead such an initiative, Rosing says, based on a survey his students conducted on how North American universities support urban agriculture. DePaul already offers nearly all the necessary core disciplines. He ticks them off:
“We can teach students to analyze compost. We can do marketing and PR, we can do entrepreneurship, we can do nutrition by involving our nursing graduate students. We can definitely do website development–we have a website incubator program through the Steans Center and the College of Computing and Digital Media. We can do policy analysis. We can do horticultural plant science. We can definitely do urban planning through [DePaul’s] Chaddick Institute [for Metropolitan Development]. We can evaluate water through environmental science. We can definitely hold conferences, and we can convene people.”
That could put DePaul on the map as a national center for urban agriculture, says Willard. “Given our interest in social justice, the Vincentian mission, the students that are interested in it, the faculty that are interested in it, and with everything that’s going on in Chicago, this is the place to make it happen.”