Please provide a brief description of the project for which you seek funding.
In 1996 the Chelsea Community Garden and its Chelsea Community Gardeners Association were developed under the umbrella of the Chelsea Collaborative (the Collaborative) to foster community gardening, community building, environmental justice, and to provide more green space within the city of Chelsea. The garden began on a single abandoned house lot and expanded two years later to the adjacent abandoned lot. The garden provides gardeners tools, a garden bed, plants and seedlings, water and gardening workshops. Historically, one of the Collaborative’s Green Space and Recreation Committee’s (Green Space) community organizers served as garden coordinator. Due to the limited number of garden plots, this organizer was not a gardener. Since 2009 the gardeners themselves have taken on more ownership of the garden and more responsibility for its oversight and development of the garden’s physical and organizational structure. When the Collaborative took a step back, the gardeners stepped forward volunteering their time, ideas, energy, and more. The garden membership is more active than it has ever been. The Chelsea Community Gardeners Association is very proud of this past year’s achievements: * Adding 5 new member beds and one large elderly/handicapped accessible bed built to wheelchair height specifications with the assistance of a 9 member YouthBuild Just-a-Start youth crew. * Expanding the Executive Committee from 3 members to 6. * Drafting, reviewing, and ratifying Chelsea Community Garden By-Laws. English and Spanish copies attached. * Designating the garden semi-organic; only organic methods of pest and weed control may be used, but a gardener may use non-organic fertilizer on her/his own bed. * Last season we had 23 families as Garden members. We are looking forward to adding 6 families, 12-15 Senior Center members, and youth from ROCA’s YouthSTAR program. * Please see our attached report to learn more about our 2010 garden season. The Chelsea Gardeners Association is hard at work developing its structure, making the garden accessible to all, creating community within the Garden and using the Garden as a bridge to connect with the larger community. The Chelsea Gardeners Association goals to further develop the Chelsea Community Garden are: * To fill the new beds with soil and mulch to ready for our new gardeners. * To level and install stone dust walkway to facilitate senior and handicapped access to garden beds. * To install a porta-potty for the garden season. This is tied to our Senior Center Garden Project detailed below in involvement of community at large. * To design and build a 3 bin compost system. * To increase shade within the garden (there is presently none) by purchasing a shade structure and constructing a grape arbor that utilizes the current tool shed and one being built by ROCA as anchors. Providing shade is key for our senior participants’ comfort and safety and facilitates our bi-weekly meetings in the garden. * To decrease the amount of formal Monthly Membership Meetings from 8 to 4 and conduct bi-weekly informal “update” meetings at the Garden on Saturday mornings to increase communication amongst gardeners. * To develop a Sub-Committee to focus on developing more green space and community gardens in Chelsea. * To draw on the gardening expertise of our gardeners to provide 3 garden workshops including Container Gardening for those on our waitlist, a Vermiculture workshop on all aspects of composting with earthworms and a 3rd workshop topic to be determined during the garden season by the gardeners. Mini-workshops will be provided throughout the season at gardeners’ requests. * To continue to utilize BNAN’s knowledge, resources, and workshops.
Project Summary
The group received a grant in 2011 to support garden expansion with garden supplies, materials, coordinator stipends and community events.
Primary Issue Area:
Food
Please break-down/categorize the program expenses:
Chelsea Artists Artwalk Weekend (Scarecrow Making Project)
$250.00
Yes
Chelsea Cafe Photo Exhibit and CCTV Vido: reception, supplies and equipment
$1,500.00
Yes
Translation services
$500.00
Yes
Garden Coordinator Stipend
$2,000.00
Yes
Office Supplies
$100.00
Yes
Photo Books
$225.00
Yes
Senior Center Garden Project
$5,000.00
Yes
New Tool Shed
$1,500.00
Whom does your group need to make this project happen?
Please explain how your group will engage members from your community in this project.
_Chelsea Senior Center Garden Project:_ We would truly like the garden to be an intergenerational space open, welcoming and accessible to all. In order to assess and address challenges to more senior participation, we met with Chelsea Senior Center staff and Latino Elders and the Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Healthy Chelsea Initiative. Collaboratively, we developed a plan to facilitate senior garden participation. It includes providing a safe means of transportation to and from the Chelsea Senior Center and Garden twice weekly, the construction of a paved walkway to safely access the elderly/handicapped beds, porta-potty, chairs and shade creation necessary to accommodate senior health issues, and garden plan designed by the seniors for the season’s cultivation. MGH will provide nutritional workshops for the seniors. There will be monthly mini documentaries produced and aired on Community Cable. There will also be photo documentation and exhibition of this project at well known community agencies such as the Collaborative. _Photo Exhibit:_ In the fall we held a well received Garden Photo Exhibit displaying gardener Melissa Shook’s work capturing the rich cultural diversity of our membership and the beauty of the garden. This sparked much interest in 2011 Garden applications. Based on its success, she has proposed an in depth photographic and video documentary project exploring the seasonal changes in the garden with an emphasis on recent immigrants' gardening stories in their own languages. A fall photo exhibit would be held. The videos would be shown on Community Cable. _Chelsea Neighborhood Developers’ (CND) Community Garden:_ Joe Rubin and Enesa Skopljak, our former and current Groundskeeper and experienced gardeners, developed a relationship with the CND gardeners by offering their novice gardeners assistance and advice in 2009. In 2010 we kept CND gardeners informed of and carpooled their members to BNAN workshops. We initiated a joint cookout with CND. We plan to make it an annual event. We will continue to carpool to BNAN workshops and to develop and strengthen our relationship with CND gardeners. _YouthBuild/Just-A-Start:_ We are so grateful to the two groups of JAS youth that helped us to rearrange, expand existing and build new garden beds over the past two years. Depending on their schedule this season, they may help us to use a donation of wooden planks to build small communal strawberry and herb beds. We will be holding a cook out for them in the Garden so that they can see the fruits of their labor, enjoy the Garden in full bloom and know that their contribution is greatly appreciated. _The ArtWalk:_ Four garden members are members of the Chelsea Artists Collaborative (CHARCOLL) which launched the Chelsea Art Walk as an annual event in 2009 “to showcase artistic expression and creative excellence from artists of all media in [Chelsea] galleries and theaters.” It is held over a weekend and shuttle buses stop at each gallery or venue highlighted. Our Garden was chosen to be 2011 ArtWalk site. We will have an “INVITATIONAL” prior to the event for artists to design and create scarecrows for exhibition in the Garden that weekend. This will bring many people to the garden that might not know about it or otherwise visit it. It will also engage the larger community in the garden. _Chelsea Community Kitchen:_ This soup kitchen and food bank operates from ROCA’s kitchen on Saturday mornings. We shared the garden’s bounty with the larger community by making weekly organic vegetable donations from our communal bed and the surplus from 3 individual beds. We plan to continue this relationship and to enlist more gardeners to commit to contributing throughout the growing season. _General Outreach to Community-At-Large:_ We will utilize the language skills of the Garden Co-Coordinators to reach out to and connect to the diversity of the larger community.
If your group receives a NEGEF Grow grant, how do you plan to pay for remaining expenses?
$ Amount
Source
$8,560.00
NEGEF BGI Grant
$700.00
CCG Dues
$1,500.00
ROCA
$4,000.00
Chelsea Community Fund
$185.00
Chelsea Greenspace Committee
$50.00
Stop and Shop
$100.00
Charcoll - Chelsea Artist Collaborative
$1,100.00
Chelsea Cultural Council
Please list these materials or services
Please describe what changes will occur in your community and its environment when your group's project is successful.
* The streets of Chelsea are cleaner than they are today. * Trash collection day is neat and orderly and those that fail to dispose of their trash using barrels or bags are ticketed by Inspectional Services. * Recycling more than doubles from 7% of all tonnage to 20%, supported by a city-funded recycling coordinator and greater levels of resident recycling than today. * The new 2011 trash and recycling policies are determined with significant resident input. * A greater percentage of community residents report that Shurtleff/ Bellingham is clean, up from a 2009 baseline of 38%.
Please list how many people in your community your group expects to actively engage in this project.