Richmond Community Garden Collective (RCGC)
The process of designing, building, maintaining and sustaining a community garden requires many elements of a community to work together across many seasons and years to achieve the individual and collective goals of the garden. When viewed as a community development tool, the community garden offers a substantial number of social, educational, economic, environmental, and community-building opportunities for every level of community. In an effort help the Community of Richmond take maximum advantage of the power of community gardens, the Richmond Community Garden Collective (RCGC) was created in 2006. RCGC intends to become a growing number of individuals, families, clubs, neighborhoods, communities, organizations, institutions and governments committed to collaborate as a collection of community gardens and community garden enthusiasts interested in strengthening Richmond through community gardening. RCGC intends to play a critical role in building a proud, unified Community of Richmond.
The Power of the Community Garden
Community gardens (any type of garden available to local residents) are much more than fruits, vegetables and flowers – they offer many social, educational, economic, environmental, and community-building opportunities for the communities they serve:
SOCIAL
- The social interaction involved with a community garden promotes teamwork, sharing, communication, conflict resolution, patience, and other useful social skills.
- Helps shape the social maturation of youth through interaction with adults
- Transitions participants from self-involvement to community involvement, from consumers to cultivators
- Involves several generations together on a project with real meaning to all
- Community gardens cross over all societal lines – age, ethnicity, language, religion, economic standing, mental and physical abilities – allowing gardeners to regularly interact in a simple environment that nurtures both individuality and community.
- The many comforting and nurturing benefits provided by a community garden to its gardeners ultimately ripples through the greater community, positively influencing many people outside the garden.
- Community gardens act as a social science laboratory, offering social scientists an opportunity to learn a great deal about individual communities, interaction between communities, and the larger human community.
- Community gardens offer many educational opportunities for youth and adults, with direct application to all educational testing, including Virginia’s SOL (Standards of Learning):
- Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Ecology, Climatology, Horticulture
- Health, Nutrition and Physical Fitness
- Arts and Humanities
- Social Studies
- Architecture and Engineering
- Business Planning and Management
- Community gardens produce food and plants that support the economy and the underserved of the greater community, while reversing the trend of the depletion of natural resources.
- The many comforting and nurturing benefits provided by a community garden to its gardeners enhances their quality of life, translating into greater productivity in the workforce, ultimately strengthening the economy of the greater community.
- Community gardens provide a number of environmental benefits:
- Release oxygen, provide cooling, prevent soil erosion and rain run-off, absorb compost destined for landfills, promote soil testing and enhance soil fertility, increase pollination and teach alternatives to petrochemical soil amendments
- Community gardens help mitigate the impact of climate change.
- Community gardens teach gardeners the importance of being good stewards of the environment, leading to enhanced awareness of the environment outside of the garden, leading to more recycling, more composting, more conservation and other benefits to the environment.
- Community gardens transition participants from self-involvement to community involvement, teaching the value of interaction with others and collaboration, with benefits rippling through the greater community.
- Direct interaction between a collection of community gardens helps strengthen relationships between communities as they share garden resources, secrets, expertise, seeds, recipes, designs, tools, innovations and energy.
- Direct interaction between a collection of community gardens promotes learning about the similarities and differences between communities, scientifically and socially:
- Scientific – soil content, climate, what is grown, when and why
- Social – what is grown and why, how it is prepared, how it is displayed, cultural and historical considerations.