As hard up as my town is at nearly 17%+ unemployment and with vacant factories...and as much poverty as there is, I still don't think of it as the sort of town where Americorps comes in to help out. But apparently it is. It is, indeed, a place where Americorps comes to help make the city a better place to live.
A friend and I went to visit the McLaughlin Urban Farm in Muskegon...which is not an Americorps endeavor, by the way...it's a Community enCompass endeavor. The farm is about a half acre in the middle of the McLaughlin neighborhood where several abandoned and condemned houses had been plowed under and as of 2009 replaced with an organic, urban farm with a large hoop house and several mounds of composting leaves and vegetable matter. It's a for-profit urban farm whose goal is to employ people in the impoverished McLaughlin neighborhood, provide local residents with fresh produce, and replace crumbling buildings with green space.
The manager of the farm, the Americorps dude, told us that this area is a hot spot for urban farming...the post-industrial regions...the rust belt regions...where populations are falling, buildings are crumbling, and disadvantaged communities are in a downward spiral of poverty and hopelessness. It is a grand experiment.....turning decay into growth. Cement into green.
A week earlier I visited a community garden near Downtown Muskegon called Love Community Gardens. The person who started it, Morning Bear, gave me a bucket of some amazing blend of composted manure to take back to my organic garden at home. All the while she had a county commissioner at the garden with a back hoe moving dirt...and one of the most amazing rain barrel setups I'd ever seen. Individuals from around the neighborhood were tending to their own raised bed plats in the community garden...tending to their vegetables under the experienced guidance of Morning Bear.
"I was about to leave the area" she told me. She was packing her bags when one of her tribal elders told her to stay and change everything she could see outside her window.
So she started this community garden.
And it became a hopeful sign in a disintegrating, impoverished part of the city...where many people have very little easy access to fresh produce.
Down the road two blocks a new community garden is going in on a vacant lot. People who I do not know are building raised beds on empty land with a mountain of black dirt off to the side.
Sometimes it feels like the world is crumbling in on you.
Like there's nothing left and you're surrounded by decay.
Like maybe, if you're still standing or hopeful enough to fight, that you're one of the only ones left who feel things can change.
And then you meet people like these urban farmers. People who are taking decay and turning it into green spaces. People who refuse to let despair and entropy be the ruling force. People who aren't waiting around for somebody to help. They're getting out their shovels and their seeds and when they see empty, overgrown spaces where a dying house and neighborhood once stood, they see productive dirt...a place where they can begin anew and create hope and food and green and life where nothing but crumbling cement once stood.
God I love my town.