Jamie Torres didn’t expect to find herself on a garden tour hosted by an 8-year-old girl. But the Denver city councilwoman gladly listened as the girl explained the basics of composting and what her family was planting in their plot that year, one of 12 at El Oasis de Lorraine community garden in East Denver.
Other gardeners talked with U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, who came to celebrate the $500,000 grant to Denver Urban Gardens from the Environmental Protection Agency.
El Oasis de Lorraine is part of the Focus Points Family Resource Center in Elyria-Swansea, where residents believe high levels of industrial and vehicle pollution have caused long-term health problems.
Denver Urban Gardens will use the grant in six West Denver neighborhoods, all in Torres’ district: West Colfax, Barnum, Barnum West, Sun Valley, Valverde and Villa Park. Like Elyria-Swansea, these neighborhoods have high concentrations of industrial buildings and sit close to Interstate 70. The grant program is one of many created by the Inflation Reduction Act to work toward environmental and climate justice.
Torres was struck by her conversation with the girl, she said. Only one in nine Denver residents has access to composting, which the city began rolling out over the summer. Education through Denver Urban Gardens can help residents learn about composting and other environmentally friendly practices, Torres said, even when the city has fallen short.
“They’re more than gardens,” Torres said. “It’s their education program as well, their ability really to attract kids into the space and turn them into educated and active members of a community who understand what’s happening around them.”
The six focus neighborhoods fall under the West Area Plan, created by Denver’s Community Planning and Development Department based on resident feedback and adopted this year. The plan is intended to guide neighborhood development for the next 20 years.
Residents’ top priority was quality of life, which they described as spaces and amenities that promote health, environmental resilience and community. Those include parks, open spaces and “green streets” with water quality infrastructure, as well as Denver Urban Gardens’ community gardens and food forests.
Denver Urban Gardens Executive Director Linda Appel Lipsius sees an opportunity to “move the needle,” combating intense heat and food insecurity in neighborhoods where a legacy of “redlining,” or racist lending policies, set back home ownership rates among residents.
Denver is one of many cities that experiences the “urban heat island effect,” where an urban area experiences significantly higher temperatures than nearby rural areas, due to high concentrations of pavement, buildings and other heat-retaining surfaces. Adding gardens and food forests can help offset these effects by providing shade and releasing moisture into the air, though they are just one part of Denver’s plan to increase tree coverage, Torres said. The city also received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to plant trees in areas that are lacking.
Denver Urban Gardens has five community gardens and four food forests in the neighborhoods covered by the West Area Plan. Torres said residents want more garden spaces, particularly to replace empty lots around their homes. Some have already approached her, identifying potential spots. Denver Urban Gardens partners with the landowner, public or private, to build new sites.
“(We want to) activate spaces that are not active, that invite trash or debris, and actually make them something we can be proud of, something we’re cultivating and maintaining ourselves as community members,” Torres said. “Those are prized locations for community.”
The gardens also provide an essential source of food in Torres’ district, where just two full-service grocery stores serve 10 neighborhoods, Torres said. Communities are still navigating how to bring in more food options without gentrifying the area, where annual household incomes average $34,000 less than Denver overall, according to the Census Bureau.
At Ruby Hill Park Community Garden, which is in Denver but slightly outside of the West Area Plan, some gardeners grow even more than they can eat, garden leader Sharona Thompson said. It lifts some of the burden for a food bank a mile away, which Thompson said has recently seen an increase in demand.
Others use the garden to supplement their groceries with foods from their home countries. Many are African refugees living in nearby public housing, who grow the amaranth, okra, corn and squash they used to harvest as farmers.
Thompson doesn’t just prioritize taking care of the community garden, but also educating people to garden by themselves, using what they already own. She encourages people to bring cuttings from the Ruby Hill Park garden back to their homes and yards if they have them. The gardeners started an urban farmers group, and one woman who started in the community garden now works to plant pollinator habitats around the neighborhood using a grant from the city.
With their new grant, Denver Urban Gardens hopes to similarly develop educational efforts in their neighborhoods of focus and empower residents.
“Yes, we want to build more gardens and food forests, but we also want to use the real estate and these sites as a spark, as a way to educate,” Lipsius said. “We’re never going to be able to meet the full demands of the city for community gardens and food forests, but we can teach people what they can do in their own yards, what they can do in their home communities.”