When Mosswood Park opened its community garden about a year ago,
residents hoped it would be a boon to the neighborhood, providing space
to grow fresh fruits and vegetables and educational activities for
local teens instead of the drug dealing that had become rampant in the
area. About six of the fifteen garden boxes were reserved for teen
gardening, and a teen center adjacent to the garden was renovated.
However, months after the garden’s inauguration, the teen garden boxes
never materialized, and many of the plants had become overgrown or were
dying.
But when Oakland’s Office of Parks and Recreation allowed a
for-profit local company called Kijiji Grows to set up an aquaponics
system in the garden and start teaching classes to teens, residents
were outraged. “We … should demand a reasonable public process for
gifting park land to non-profits (or for profits …),” wrote one
resident on a community e-mail list. “What the heck is going on here?
As I understand it, a for-profit business has broken into to a hard-won
community garden,” said another. “It is a serious drag that it now
takes constant vigilance to keep the City of Oakland from actively
doing you dirt.”
The company’s co-owners, Keba Konte and Eric Mandu, say they hope
their presence will contribute to the community. “We’re not selling any
technology, we’re absolutely not selling produce,” said Konte, who’s
also the owner of Guerilla Cafe in Berkeley. “As a company, what was in
it for us was that we would be able to demonstrate what this technology
does.” The East Bay company sells aquaponics gardening systems, in
which a pipe cycles water between a fish tank and a garden box,
allowing the plants to be fertilized by the fish waste and the roots of
the plants to filter fresh water back to the fish. In the past, Kijiji
Grows has collaborated with the nonprofit Mo’ Better Foods and this
year’s Malcolm X Jazz Festival, where they taught kids about
aquaponics.
Konte had approached Oakland’s Office of Parks and Recreation
earlier this summer, suggesting that they collaborate. The cash-starved
parks department saw it as a way to keep its garden clean and to
provide programs at its teen center for free. Audree Jones-Taylor,
director of Oakland Parks and Recreation, told a group of residents at
a community meeting in mid-September that to fill the many needs of the
parks “we are leveraging services left and right.”
But some residents feel that Kijiji Grows is getting a free pass.
Typically, aspiring gardeners have to submit an application and $25 fee
to reserve a garden box, and other users of the park also have to pay
rent, such as a Jazzercize class and the nonprofit elementary school
Bridgemount Academy, which uses three rooms in the rec center to hold
classes. However, the parks department admitted that it’s not requiring
Kijiji to pay rent, nor did they sign an official agreement with the
company outlining the terms of their tenancy.
Residents also weren’t told about Kijiji’s tenancy. In fact,
community gardeners only found out about the company’s plans in late
July, when they discovered changes in the setup of their area: Junk
that was usually stored in the dilapidated teen center adjacent to the
garden had been moved to the garden itself; a lock on one of the gates
had been broken off; a hole was drilled in the wall of the teen center
and an extension cord was threaded through, leading to a garden plot
with running water and a fish tank attached. The company, meanwhile,
says the lock was removed to make the garden more accessible. “Right
now, there’s about four people who have the combination to the gate and
they come in and water their garden and they leave,” Konte said. His
main motivation, he said, was to make the community garden, “a lot more
accessible than what it is.”
That attitude seemed cavalier to some and heroic to others. In an
e-mail, Seth Katz, a community member who cleaned up a section of the
park to create a dog run a few years ago, was frustrated that, although
he and others had wrestled with bureaucracy to improve certain sections
of the park, “Kijiji Grows shows up and, they build something without
permits, … steal power and water, and wire illegally, and they are
still there today.” But elementary school teacher Casie Lopez saw
Kijiji as the only means to filling the most essential responsibility
of the park — keeping the local kids learning instead of turning
to drugs and criminal activity. “I’m not gonna stop working until this
center is solvent,” she asserted at a recent community meeting. While
the classes Kijiji Grows had intended to teach at Mosswood to teenagers
have been on hold during the controversy, many community members
expressed their gratitude to the aquaponics company for the pilot class
they taught over the summer, and for the sheer beauty of their
produce.
The tensions found in the Mosswood community aren’t unique, but they
reflect a greater issue: how city agencies are coping with severe
budget cuts. According to Jones-Taylor, the the Office of Parks and
Recreation’s budget had been cut by $12 million from five years ago.
Until mid-July, Oakland’s community gardens were running smoothly under
garden coordinator Josh Amaris. When he left in midsummer, the parks
department took three months to hire his replacement, Harith Aleem.
Many of the Mosswood community members said they felt the department
found it more cost effective to eliminate that position indefinitly,
had it not been for the rancor caused by the miscommunicaton in
Mosswood’s garden. The lack of leadership during those three months was
felt in other community gardens in Oakland as well. Jean Robertson,
volunteer coordinator of Golden Gate Community Garden in Oakland,
complained of “eons of Bermuda grass” that used to get cleared away.
With the absence of a garden coordinator, the gardens were slipping
into disarray, especially as residents were dealing with their own
financial challenges. At the September community meeting at Mosswood
Park, Jones-Taylor told an upset group of gardeners that she clearly
needed to fill the position faster than she thought.
For the parks department, bringing in private companies may be one
of the ways to save local parks. So is this a slow privitization of the
parks, as some community members contend, or a creative solution that
lifts up local entrepreneurship? Jones-Taylor made the decision to keep
Kijiji Grows in Mosswood, although she admitted that their presence
would have to stay small since they stepped on so many toes initially.
“I think their model is great,” she said after the September community
meeting. “This is not the best spot for it, but parks are blighted.” As
for the community of people who still oppose the presence of Kijiji
Grows, Jones-Taylor was confident that the aquaponics group would
impress people with their work in the community and with the beauty of
their organic produce. “They’ll see,” she said.
