CNN recently highlighted a community garden located in a part of Atlanta, Georgia, known as Mechanicsville. For CNN.com story, click here. The story highlights HABESHA Gardens, HABESHA stands for Helping Africa By Establishing Schools at Home and Abroad, is a garden that not only provides food to the city’s neediest but provides an important link to urban dwellers with their past. According to Cashawn Myers, director of the garden,
"It's a reawakening going on. It's almost like it's a renaissance... There's a Ghanaian proverb that says Sankofa. Sankofa means return to your past so you can move forward. Even if you look at coming over here during our enslavement, we were brought here to cultivate the land because that's something we did on the continent. So really, that's what many of the people are doing now... “In his view urban farming provides urban African-Americans a way to reconnect with their pasts. The garden is open to all in the area
“to come out, work in the garden; learn, reconnect with the Earth and also be able to take food home with them after the harvest[,]”according to Myers.
The garden not only feeds the poor, but
mentors young African-Americans by sending them on a yearly trip to Ghana and educates the youth in Mechanicsville through the garden's after-school program called Sustainable Seeds.HABESHA Gardens is not the only urban farm organization, former NBA player, Will Allen, is the founder of Growing Power, Inc., and is considered the leading urban gardner in the U.S. Growing Power has urban farms all over the U.S. According to Allen, “Minority people are affected by poor food, more than any other groups," and many inner cities lack access to quality fruits and vegetables, Allen says. "Our food system is broken.” Because urban areas lack full-scale grocery stores, the community gardens step in and provided access to fruits and vegetables.
Posted: 7/01/09
