Trail View Community Garden

Ren Dennis was approached by Cori Sereni, one of our community partners and operator of El Mercado, about the possibility of starting a community garden in Cori’s neighborhood. Ren Dennis then approached Celestina Garcia and both students began working with Cori and other community leaders to see the project to fruition.

The Trail View neighborhood was a project undertaken by the Monroe County Habitat for Humanity. Above is an infographic depicting the benefits of living in a Habitat neighborhood as well as specific features of Trail View.

As noted by Thomas Bassett in “Reaping on the Margins: A century of community gardening in America”, community gardening (a common way of growing food in urban spaces) has been used for well-over a century in the United States. It has gone through many iterations such as:

• Potato patches
• School gardens
• City garden plots
• Liberty gardens (World War I)
• Relief gardens (The Great Depression)
• Victory gardens (World War II)
• And finally: Community gardens, which is our most recent approach.

The team felt it was important to include the voices of community members in the planning and implementation of the garden, especially given the common downfalls of ignoring the voices of those who are supposed to be served within urban agriculture initiatives. We feel that this is important based on Betz et al.'s critique of community food models as “reinforcing white, affluent spaces of “good” food and reinforcing a choice-based, neoliberal ideology in place of food system reform”. In other words, urban agriculture can sometimes fail to serve the community it is located in and instead cater to an affluent mainly-white market. This undermines the goals of urban agriculture to alleviate such social ills as food insecurity. Ren Dennis and Celestina Garcia both strongly believe that the community should always come first in projects such as this one.

Ren and Celestina spent several Monday evenings at Trail View making plans with community members. These included a desire for permaculture design in the garden and finding various ways we could access free seeds, plants, and tools.

In the midst of our planning, as we waited for spring and ideal weather, the COVID-19 pandemic reached Indiana. It was first announced that school would be online for two weeks with no university related travel. Then it was announced that students would be moving out and there would be no in-person classes for the rest of the semester. This also meant that Ren and Celestina could no longer visit the neighborhood for meetings or work days.

Ren and Celestina had access to funds through Collins Living-Learning Center and were able to help fund the project remotely.

While progress on the garden slowed greatly, we can still speculate on the possible outcomes of a community garden at Trail View.

Ren and Celestina hope that the garden will increase

• Food security - Having a garden with fresh fruits and vegetables nearby can help increase access to healthy food for those living nearby
• Community engagement - The garden will be a place for neighbors to congregate and chat as well as share food
• Community empowerment - Having the garden can help empower members of the neighborhood with skills to share and create a community-wide sense of agency
• Interest in youth food education - The nearby Fairview Elementary School is getting it's own garden and hydroponic system, hopefully the children of the neighborhood will see fresh food growing both at home and school and develop a lifelong interest in fresh food

The map above shows the Trail View neighborhood and some key points. The house icons represent houses that have been added since the image was taken. The green icon shows the location of the garden. The pink line represents the fence that block Trail View from the train tracks and from Butler Park as well as the Butler Park Community Gardens. The trail icons represent the entrances to the B-Line walking and biking trail from Trail View. The parking icons indicate the nearest parking spots to the garden, although there is street parking throughout the neighborhood.

Members of the Trail View Neighborhood

Dr. Olga Kalentzidou

Theresa Quill

Indiana University Bloomington Geography Department

Municipal map of Trail View:  https://bloomington.in.gov/gisdata/mapgallery/Housing-Neighborhoods/NeighborhoodAssociations/IndividualNeighborhoodMaps/trailview_nbrmap.pdf 

Habitat for Humanity Trail View Infographic:  http://nearwestside.bloomington.in.us/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2015/05/FINAL-Trail-View-Postcard-wbleeds.pdf 

Title Image:  https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/city,-habitat-partner-to-build-new-neighborhood.php 

Bassett, T. (1981). Reaping on the Margins: A century of community gardening in America. Landscape, 25(2), 1-8.

Betz, M., Mills, J., Farmer, J. (2017). A preliminary overview of community orcharding in the United States. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 7(2), Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2017.072.002