- Info
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.
Garden Collective Flyer
On Community
"Community is
the spirit, the guiding light of the tribe, whereby people come together
in order to fulfill a specific purpose, to help others fulfill their
purpose, and to take care of one another.
The goal of
the community is to make sure that each member of the community is heard
and is properly giving the [talents] that they have brought to this
world. Without these [talents], the community dies. And without the
community, the individual is left without a place where they can
contribute.
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
