The Press-Enterprise Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, California, USA
January 27, 2007 Seeds for something bigger and better in San Bernardino By CHRIS RICHARD The Press-Enterprise At a Westside San Bernardino park on Monday, civic activists will break ground on their first community garden, a little more than an acre of soil envisioned as a seedbed for hope. "Back in the day, people would relate taking care of kids to taking care of your garden," said the Rev. Bronica Martindale, president of the California Gardens Neighborhood Cluster Association. "We don't have that any more. We have fast food. Fast food, fast kids. Well, you see the result," she said. "And we just need to cultivate again. We need to take that time." Martindale calls her garden project a first step toward modeling a more wholesome way of life for the toughest neighborhoods of San Bernardino's Westside -- African-American and Latino neighborhoods long plagued by poverty and violent crime. City officials have set aside a 40-foot-by-139-foot stretch of ground at the park's north end for 20 garden plots. Glenn Baude, director of San Bernardino's Operation Phoenix pilot program, said the city parks department will provide building materials and irrigation systems, and a Cal State San Bernardino graduate student has volunteered to build a small greenhouse. The Parks, Recreation and Community Services Department will open an unused building near the garden site for classes ranging from gardening to parenting, Baude said. Baude said he respects Martindale's accomplishment in recruiting collaborators, from city and county government agencies to local schools and churches. In May, Mayor Pat Morris established the pilot program that Baude oversees in the San Bernardino neighborhood, a 20-block area just north of City Hall. Officials say a blend of intensive police patrols and social programs such as job training, parenting classes and youth recreation is redeeming the area, which has shown a marked drop in the crime rate. But it was October before Operation Phoenix recruited its first neighborhood leaders. By contrast, the garden project has been able to call on already-established neighborhood ties, Baude said. Regina Funderburk, who lives a block west of Anne Shirrells Park, believes a garden could make those ties even stronger. Growing up in the neighborhood in the 1970s, she remembers joining other children for games of baseball, basketball and football. These days, she rarely sees such gatherings. Perhaps this project can be a precursor to a local recreation center that will draw the neighborhood together, she said. "We're planting the seeds for something bigger and greater," Funderburk said. Martindale hopes that's true. A little more than a mile east of the garden site is the basketball court where, last June, 11-year-old Anthony Michael Ramirez was killed in an unprovoked shooting spree. A 16-year-old boy is being tried as an adult in the homicide. Even closer to the park, another child, 14-year-old Jarred Mitchell, fell in a drive-by shooting in May. Martindale, an associate minister at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, assisted in Jarred's funeral. She said that during the ceremony, a brief scuffle erupted between two groups of boys. She said the clash only lasted a moment. But she saw children with no sense of decorum, no awe for the dignity of the church, no fear of punishment, she said. She saw adults apparently numb to whatever those angry boys might do. Later, Martindale said, she prayed. And she found herself remembering how much her grandparents had loved growing plants. Never a gardener herself, she wanted to learn what they had known. She's not sure what she'll feel and smell, when some day she digs her fingers into the soil of a garden. But she's sure it will be good, and she wants the children living in Anthony's and Jarred's neighborhood to find out, too. "When you plant something, you're hoping that through your taking care of it and cultivating it, that it's going to grow," Martindale said. "It's going to become what you planted it to become. And I think that by doing that, that our kids will develop that caringness that some of them are lacking right now. I'm hoping that when they put their hand out and feel that plant, that they'll be connected back to life." Reach Chris Richard at 909-806-3076 or crichard at PE.com http://www.pe.com/localnews/sanbernardino/stories/PE_News_Local_B_bgarden28.42c5034.html ? 2007 Press-Enterprise Company
