14 November 2010

Over the summer, B.E.A.N. (Becoming Environmentally Aware Nationwide) continued the successes of Alchemical's Community Gardening Initiatives by finishing its final phase of renovating the Kwanzaa Village Garden on August 12, 2010. After four months, hundreds of hours of work, and with the assistance of local organizations such as Cornell Cooperative Extension, as well as landing a grant of $2,100 from the Gifford Foundation through fiscal sponsorship from Alchemical, the Kwanzaa Village Garden received a complete makeover. 

Its resurrection did experience a few bumps in the road. On a particularly hot, humid evening in August, B.E.A.N. and the Kwanzaa Village Gardeners were admiring the first completed section of white picket fence that now borders the garden; at around 8:30 PM, B.E.A.N. and the gardeners decided to cease work for the day. At 9:00 AM the following morning, Mrs. Geneva Hayden (Founder of the Kwanzaa Village Garden) notified B.E.A.N. that someone had vandalized the garden’s fence. B.E.A.N. immediately contacted the authorities and the gardeners.

The next day, Mario Callaway (Co-founder of B.E.A.N.) stumbled upon a sturdy left-over wooden pallet from a delivery of garden supplies. Initially tempted to discard the pallet, he then realized that it (along with about 30 more) could be refurbished to reinforce the white picket fence against would be vandals - a very good example of a zero waste action. B.E.A.N. contacted a home and garden store located in Syracuse and requested additional wooden pallets. Eight truckloads of pallets later (courtesy of Mr. Hayden), B.E.A.N and the gardeners promptly reinforced the entire fence area of Kwanzaa Village Garden with the wooden pallets. Shortly after its completion, B.E.A.N. invited neighborhood youth into the garden and allowed them to paint the newly erected fence sections. The Kwanzaa Village Garden continues to flourish today, and its gardeners have not experienced a recurrence of vandalism.

Gardener Ebony Ferguson sums it up, saying “This is something positive. It’s making a change, so I can’t give up on this.”


The Damage Done.













Creative Regenerative and Zero Waste Thinking.













Gardeners Joining Together to Bring Back the Love.













Mission Accomplished.

< Prev		Next >