Randolph Street Community Garden Expansion Project

I am Dawn Blackman the Garden Steward. I'm raising money to benefit the Randolph Street Community Garden. The Champaign Church Of The Brethren is our fiscal agent. Any donation will help us impact those at risk for hunger. Join me in making a difference. Thanks in advance for contributing to this cause, which means so much to me.

The Randolph Street Community aims to provide residents living in a food desert the opportunity to grow or purchase healthy produce and to pass on gardening traditions to a new generation of children.

People from across our community belong to our garden. This season there were eight (8) languages spoken by gardeners. Participants ranged in age from 2 to 86. We hosted twenty (20) smell tours in our herb bed for 200 unique children from area day camps, daycare centers, and family groups. Our free 1/2 day garden camp served eight children each of the program's four weeks. Thirty-six unique individuals attended our weekly storytime. We served as a site for the job training program for the YES (Youth Employment Service) for Unit 4 School District and the SYEP (Summer Youth Employment Service) for the Chancellor's Office and our neighborhood program. Eleven students were served over the nine (9) week training program. We held our Market Place in two locations taking our fresh produce into the neighborhood and having a marketplace under our big red tent in the garden. Five families participated in our ANTs (Adults aNd Toddlers) gardening group. Volunteers donated 1,481 hours so far in 2022. Events drew over 1000 guests to the garden.

In all, there were over 6000 visits made to the garden while we were there to count.

 We want to expand this project to include:

Erecting greenhouse! A greenhouse will let us grow year round and allow us to train our students in other aspects of growing. We will locate the greenhouse on the south-facing lot next to the Champaign Church of the Brethren. This location will satisfy the need for more growing beds north of Bradley and east of Neil. The magnitude of the need has increased in the light of the Pandemic and subsequent shutdown. People must have food re- sources that are not only close at hand but also help to provide for themselves. We believe that the increase in requests for garden beds demonstrates the need to not only help to feed the body through our food pantry but to feed the spirit of the community with shared work that brings us all closer together and makes us stronger.

Thank you to all who have donated in the past, those who will donate, and those who have helped in so many ways.

Hello Garden Friends,

Summer 2022 has been quite an experience. We began the installation of our FarmBot. We added a white picket fence around the newly inaugurated "KIDDIE GARDEN". Several coding classes were held to learn to progam the Farm Bot.

The Garden has acquired two additional sculptures by local artists. Please check them out next to the bike path, on the Randolph Street side of the Garden, just north of the driveway into Statton Elementary School's parking lot. There are two new murals on either end of the grape arbor in the center of the garden. Come take a photograph as our butterfly and view our "Fairy Garden" with its unicorn and fairies.

In our last update, we shared our plan to erect a greenhouse.

We continue to fund rais for this project. To date, over $68,000.00 has been raised.

Thank you to everyone who has given or will give to this project. Our community is stronger when all its residents have access to healthy food.

The Intersection of Academia and Mother Witt - a town to gown initiative. This community-led initiative is meant to increase and continue positive results of graduate student participation in research projects based in the community. Growing healthy relationships is one of the original prongs of this critical initiative.

The first part of this expansion is purchasing a property that will increase the number of garden beds available to community members. These new beds will be more accessible to gardeners, particularly children who live north of Bradley and east of Neil, for whom crossing Neil and Bradley to the central garden is difficult and dangerous.

The second part of the expansion involves using the dwelling on the same property. This dwelling would be occupied by up to three (3) graduate students doing projects/research in the north end. We have identified three (3) disciplines for the initial program. They are Urban Planning, Agriculture, and Social Work (MSW).

The fourth member of the team and the permanent position is that of Mother Witt. This position is to be filled by a community member who will live in the adjacent house, introduce the students to the other community members, and help identify community members who would continue the team projects once the students complete their work.

This “Town to Gown” initiative to house, in the community, graduate students assisted by local community organizers will allow them to:

Develop trusting relationships with community members

Conduct research (with community members) that articulates their needs

Develop and implement programs to meet those needs.

 Serve as a repository and library for research papers and presentations so that knowledge can be shared, passed on, and used as documentation of the need for additional projects.

 In addition to the above items, adding a canning kitchen will offer a space where community members can learn and teach others how to preserve the summer’s bounty for the winter.

The Randolph Street Community Garden is a key development site for the Champaign community. It is where diverse populations intersect and interact. People who are black, brown, red, white, and yellow, city residents and university students, church and un-churched, children, men, women, able-bodied, disabled, and elders participate. We are building a community at the Randolph Street Community Garden, where food, fun, and friendship grow!

Your donation will help continue and expand this crucial community development work.

·

For further information, contact Dawn Blackman at [email redacted] dot com.

https://randolphcommunitygarden.com/

@randolphstreetcommunitygarden

 · Community