Community Garden at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno
We are a group of teachers, students, parents and community members who seek to create a school/community garden at Woodrow Wilson High School for education, health, and community development.
Wilson Students Breaking Ground for the Community Garden
The Vision for the Garden
In Fall 2009, the Leadership Development in Interethnic Relations class conducted student action research to investigate access to healthy foods and green space in El Sereno. The Parent Center hosts weekly classes on Ancestral Foodways with El Compadre Guillermo. At the same time, MEChA, a student-led organization on campus, created opportunities to connect to the community, promote cultural awareness, and advance learning. Using computational thinking, students in the Exploring Computer Science course created web pages, animation, and used smart phones to collect and analyze data. UCLA Center X’s TIIP grant allowed teachers to combine efforts with these schooling participants and come up with a common vision.
On Community
And so the community is that grounding place where people come and share their [talents] and receive from others. When you don’t have community, you are not listened to: you don’t have a place you can go to and feel that you really belong. You don’t have people to affirm who you are and to support you in bringing forward your gifts. What this does to the person’s psyche is that it disempowers it, making the person vulnerable to consumerism and all the things that come along with it. Also, it leaves many people who have wonderful [talents], wonderful contributions to make, hold back their [talents], not knowing where to put them. And without the unloading of our [talents] we experience a blockage inside, and this blockage affects us spiritually, mentally, and physically in many different ways. We are left without a home, a home to go to when we need to be seen."
-- Sobonfu Somé
(1999)
Woman from Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso