Send Community_garden mailing list submissions to
[email protected]
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
[email protected]
You can reach the person managing the list at
[email protected]
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Community_garden digest..."
Today's Topics:
1. Liability Insurance? (wade patterson)
2. A Good Food Manifesto for America, by Will Allen (Diane Dodge)
3. Re: Liability Insurance? (Jack Hale)
4. Organize Campaign Supporting Will Allen's Call for Centers
for Urban Agriculture (James Godsil)
5. Re: Organize Campaign Supporting Will Allen's Call for
Centers for Urban Agriculture (K. Rashid Nuri)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 13:57:44 -0600
From: wade patterson <[email protected]>
Subject: [Community_garden] Liability Insurance?
To: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed";
DelSp="yes"
Hello,
I am wondering if any of you out there have liability insurance for
your garden projects and are willing to share the mechanisms used to
get coverage. We run a community garden program on a vacant lot owned
by another private party. We have a contractual agreement with the
owner for use and also have gardeners sign a "hold harmless" waiver
exempting us and the owner from injury incurred by them and anyone
they invite into the space. BUT, the space is not secured and anyone
else that was not invited that came onto the property and injured
themselves could conceivably sue for damages (even with a fence, the
garden could be considered an attractive nuisance).
We have exhausted the efforts of our organization's insurance agent
and a volunteer lawyer working on our behalf. What to do?! What have
you done? We have coverage for events we hold off-site, but our
insurer says if they covered the garden, they would consider it a
"continuous, on-going event" and charge us something like a few
hundred dollars a day!! Clearly they don't want to take on this risk.
My feeling, though, is that with the huge interest in gardens of late,
some insurers may be rethinking their approach to this use. What's the
scoop in your neck of the woods?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Wade Patterson
Community Planner
Harwood-a creative center for community & the arts
Visit our website or follow us on twitter
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090508/e1b68dbb/attachment.html
>
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 20:16:03 -0500
From: Diane Dodge <[email protected]>
Subject: [Community_garden] A Good Food Manifesto for America, by Will
Allen
To: ACGA <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
5500 W. Silver Spring Dr.
Milwaukee WI
53218
Phone: (414) 527-1546
Fax: (414) 527-1908
www.growingpower.org
[email protected]
A Good Food
Manifesto for America
By Will Allen
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
I am a farmer. While I find that
this has come to mean many other things to other people ? that I
have become
also a trainer and teacher, and to some a sort of food philosopher ?
I do like
nothing better than to get my hands into good rich soil and sow the
seeds of
hope.
So, spring always enlivens me and
gives me the energy to make haste, to feel confidence, to take full
advantage
of another all-too-short Wisconsin summer.
This spring, however, much more so
than in past springs, I feel my hope and confidence mixed with a
sense of
greater urgency. This spring, I know that my work will be all the more
important, for the simple but profound reason that more people are
hungry.
For years I have argued that our
food system is broken, and I have tried to teach what I believe must
be done to
fix it. This year, and last, we have begun seeing the unfortunate
results of
systemic breakdown. We have seen it in higher prices for those who
can less
afford to pay, in lines at local food pantries, churches and
missions, and in
the anxious eyes of people who have suddenly become unemployed. We
have seen
it, too, in nationwide outbreaks of food-borne illness in products
as unlikely
as spinach and peanuts.
Severe economic recession
certainly has not helped matters, but the current economy is not
alone to
blame. This situation has been spinning toward this day for decades.
And while
many of my acquaintances tend to point the finger at the big agro-
chemical
conglomerates as villains, the fault really is with all of us who
casually,
willingly, even happily surrendered our rights to safe, wholesome,
affordable
and plentiful food in exchange for over-processed and pre-packaged
convenience.
Over the past century, we allowed our
agriculture to become more and more industrialized, more and more
reliant on
unsustainable practices, and much more distant from the source to
the consumer.
We have allowed corn and soybeans, grown on the finest farmland in
the world,
to become industrial commodities rather than foodstuffs. We have
encouraged a
system by which most of the green vegetables we eat come from a few
hundred
square miles of irrigated semi-desert in California.
When fuel prices skyrocket, as they
did last year, things go awry. When a bubble like ethanol builds and
then
bursts, things go haywire. When drought strikes that valley in
California, as is
happening right now, things start to topple. And when the whole
economy
shatters, the security of a nation?s food supply teeters on the
brink of
failure.
To many people, this might sound a
bit hysterical. There is still food in the suburban supermarket
aisles, yes.
The shelves are not empty; there are no bread lines. We haven?t read
of any
number of Americans actually starving to death.
No, and were any of those things
to happen, you can rest assured that there would be swift and
vigorous action.
What is happening is that many vulnerable people, especially in the
large
cities where most of us live, in vast urban tracts where there are
in fact no
supermarkets, are being forced to buy cheaper and lower-quality
foods, to forgo
fresh fruits and vegetables, or are relying on food programs ?
including our
children?s school food programs ? that by necessity are obliged to
distribute
any kind of food they can afford, good for you or not. And this is
coming to
haunt us in health care and social costs. No, we are not suddenly
starving to
death; we are slowly but surely malnourishing ourselves to death.
And this fate
is falling ever more heavily on those who were already stressed: the
poor. Yet
there is little action.
Many astute and well-informed
people beside myself, most notably Michael Pollan, in a highly
persuasive
treatise last fall in the New York Times, have issued these same
warnings and
laid out the case for reform of our national food policy. I need not
go on
repeating what Pollan and others have already said so well, and I do
not wish
merely to add my voice to a chorus.
I am writing to demand action.
It is time and past time for this
nation, this government, to react to the dangers inherent in its
flawed farm
and food policies and to reverse course from subsidizing wealth to
subsidizing
health.
We have to stop paying the largest
farm subsidies to large growers of unsustainable and inedible crops
like
cotton. We have to stop paying huge subsidies to Big Corn, Big Soy
and Big Chem
to use prime farmland to grow fuel, plastics and fructose. We have
to stop
using federal and state agencies and institutions as taxpayer-funded
research
arms for the very practices that got us into this mess.
We have to start subsidizing
health and well-being by rewarding sustainable practices in
agriculture and
assuring a safe, adequate and wholesome food supply to all our
citizens. And we
need to start this reform process now, as part of the national
stimulus toward
economic recovery.
In my organization, Growing Power
Inc. of Milwaukee,
we have always before tried to be as self-sustaining as possible and
to rely on
the market for our success. Typically, I would not want to lean on
government
support, because part of the lesson we teach is to be self-reliant.
But these are not typical times,
as we are now all too well aware.
As soon as it became clear that
Congress would pass the National Recovery Act, I and members of my
staff
brainstormed ideas for a meaningful stimulus package aimed at
creating green
jobs, shoring up the security of our urban food systems, and
promoting sound
food policies of national scope. The outcome needed to be both ?
shovel-ready?
for immediate impact and sustainable for future growth.
We produced a proposal for the
creation of a public-private enabling institution called the Centers
for Urban
Agriculture. It would incorporate a national training and outreach
center, a
large working urban farmstead, a research and development center, a
policy
institute, and a state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration
center
into which all of these elements would be combined in a functioning
community
food system scaled to the needs of a large city.
We proposed that this working
institution ? not a ?think tank? but a ?do tank? ? be based in
Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already
created an operating model on just two acres. But ultimately,
satellite centers
would become established in urban areas across the nation. Each
would be the
hub of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that
would
provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food
distribution
to those most in need of nutritional support and security.
This proposal was forwarded in
February to our highest officials at the city, state and federal
level, and it
was greeted with considerable approval. Unfortunately, however, it
soon became
clear that the way Congress had structured the stimulus package,
with funds
earmarked for only particular sectors of the economy, chiefly
infrastructure,
afforded neither our Congressional representatives nor our local
leaders with
the discretion to direct any significant funds to this innovative
plan. It
simply had not occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job
creation was
plausible in a field such as community-based agriculture.
I am asking Congress today to
rectify that oversight, whether by modifying the current guidelines
of the
Recovery Act or by designating new and dedicated funds to the
development of
community food systems through the creation of this national Centers
for Urban
Agriculture.
Our proposal budgeted the initial
creation of this CUA at a minimum of $63 million over two years ? a
droplet
compared to the billions being invested in other programs both in
the stimulus
plan and from year-to-year in the federal budget.
Consider that the government will
fund the Centers for Disease Control at about $8.8 billion this
year, and that
is above the hundreds of millions more in research grants to other
bio-medical
institutions, public and private. This is money well spent for
important work
to ensure Americans the best knowledge in protecting health by
fighting
disease; but surely by now we ought to recognize that the best
offense against
many diseases is the defense provided by a healthy and adequate
diet. Yet
barely a pittance of CDC money goes for any kind of preventive care
research.
In 2008, the Department of
Homeland Security approved spending $450 million for a new National
Bio and
Agro-Defense Facility at Kansas
State University,
in addition to the existing Biosecurity Research Institute already
there.
Again, money well spent to protect our food supply from the
potential of a
terrorist attack. But note that these hundreds of millions are being
spent to
protect us from a threat that may never materialize, while we seem to
trivialize the very real and material threat that is upon us right
now: the
threat of malnourishment and undernourishment of very significant
number of our
citizens.
Government programs under the
overwhelmed and overburdened departments of Agriculture and of
Health and Human
Services do their best to serve their many masters, but in the end,
government
farm and food policies are most often at odds between the needs of
the young,
the old, the sick and the poor versus the wants of the super-
industry that
agriculture has become.
By and large, the government?s
funding of nutritional health comes down to spending millions on
studies to
tell us what we ought to eat without in any way guaranteeing that
many people
will be able to find or afford the foods they recommend. For
instance, food
stamps ensure only that poor people can buy food; they cannot ensure
that, in
the food deserts that America?s
inner cities have become, there will be any good food to buy.
We need a national nutrition plan
that is not just another entitlement, that is not a matter of
shipping surplus
calories to schools, senior centers, and veterans? homes. We need a
plan that
encourages a return to the best practices of both farming and
marketing, that
rewards the grower who protects the environment and his customers by
nourishing
his soil with compost instead of chemicals and who ships his goods
the shortest
distance, not the longest.
If the main purpose of government
is to provide for the common security of its citizens, surely
ensuring the
security of their food system must be among its paramount duties.
And if among
our rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we are
denied all
those rights if our cities become prisons of poverty and malnutrition.
As an African-American farmer, I
am calling on the first African-American president of the United
States
to lead us quickly away from this deepening crisis. Demand,
President Obama,
that Congress and your own Administration begin without delay the
process of
reforming our farm and food policies. Start now by correcting the
omission in
your economic stimulus and recovery act that prevented significant
spending on
creating new and sustainable jobs for the poor in our urban centers
as well as
rural farm communities.
It will be an irony, certainly,
but a sweet one, if millions of African-Americans whose grandparents
left the
farms of the South for the factories of the North, only to see those
factories
close, should now find fulfillment in learning once again to live
close to the
soil and to the food it gives to all of us.
I would hope that we can move
along a continuum to make sure that all of citizens have access to
the same
fresh, safe, affordable good food regardless of their cultural,
social or
economic situation.
* * *
_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live?: Keep your life in sync.
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_BR_life_in_synch_052009
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Fri, 8 May 2009 22:35:28 -0400
From: Jack Hale <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Community_garden] Liability Insurance?
To: wade patterson <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed;
delsp=yes
Where are you located?
Jack Hale
Sent from my iPod
On May 8, 2009, at 3:57 PM, wade patterson <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello,
I am wondering if any of you out there have liability insurance for
your garden projects and are willing to share the mechanisms used to
get coverage. We run a community garden program on a vacant lot
owned by another private party. We have a contractual agreement with
the owner for use and also have gardeners sign a "hold harmless"
waiver exempting us and the owner from injury incurred by them and
anyone they invite into the space. BUT, the space is not secured and
anyone else that was not invited that came onto the property and
injured themselves could conceivably sue for damages (even with a
fence, the garden could be considered an attractive nuisance).
We have exhausted the efforts of our organization's insurance agent
and a volunteer lawyer working on our behalf. What to do?! What have
you done? We have coverage for events we hold off-site, but our
insurer says if they covered the garden, they would consider it a
"continuous, on-going event" and charge us something like a few
hundred dollars a day!! Clearly they don't want to take on this
risk. My feeling, though, is that with the huge interest in gardens
of late, some insurers may be rethinking their approach to this use.
What's the scoop in your neck of the woods?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Wade Patterson
Community Planner
Harwood-a creative center for community & the arts
Visit our website or follow us on twitter
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090508/e1b68dbb/attachment.html
_______________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one
of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the
ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org
To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected]
To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 07:29:56 -0500
From: James Godsil <[email protected]>
Subject: [Community_garden] Organize Campaign Supporting Will Allen's
Call for Centers for Urban Agriculture
To: Community Gardens USA <[email protected]>
Message-ID:
<[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the National
Recovery
Act, I and members of my staff brainstormed ideas for a meaningful
stimulus
package aimed at creating green jobs, shoring up the security of our
urban
food systems, and promoting sound food policies of national scope. The
outcome needed to be both ?shovel-ready? for immediate impact and
sustainable for future growth.
We produced a proposal for the creation of a public-private enabling
institution called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. It would
incorporate a
national training and outreach center, a large working urban
farmstead, a
research and development center, a policy institute, and a
state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into
which all of
these elements would be combined in a functioning community food
system
scaled to the needs of a large city.
We proposed that this working institution ? not a ?think tank? but
a ?do
tank? ? be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already
created an
operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers
would
become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be
the hub
of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would
provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food
distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and
security.
This proposal was forwarded in February to our highest officials at
the
city, state and federal level, and it was greeted with considerable
approval. Unfortunately, however, it soon became clear that the way
Congress
had structured the stimulus package, with funds earmarked for only
particular sectors of the economy, chiefly infrastructure, afforded
neither
our Congressional representatives nor our local leaders with the
discretion
to direct any significant funds to this innovative plan. It simply
had not
occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job creation was
plausible in
a field such as community-based agriculture.
I am asking Congress today to rectify that oversight, whether by
modifying
the current guidelines of the Recovery Act or by designating new and
dedicated funds to the development of community food systems through
the
creation of this national Centers for Urban Agriculture.
---
Anyone up for brainstorming ways of advancing this concept?
Godsil, Board Member
Growing Power
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090509/168ccbfc/attachment.html
>
------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 05:42:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: "K. Rashid Nuri" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Community_garden] Organize Campaign Supporting Will
Allen's Call for Centers for Urban Agriculture
To: James Godsil <[email protected]>, ACGA
<[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Wow!
We established the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban
Agriculture, Inc., a 501c3 here in Atlanta Georgia in?2007. ?Goals
are ?almost the same as those you have stated. Note the similarity
of the name. Progress has begun, but we lack funding to make the
vision full blown. Will Allen has visited our work and supports the
efforts.
Let me know what I can do to assist.
Peace
K. Rashid Nuri
Truly Living Well Natural Urban Farms
P.O. Box 90841
East Point GA 30364
Phone: 404 520 8331
www.trulylivingwell.com
It is simply service that measures success. - George Washington Carver
________________________________
From: James Godsil <[email protected]>
To: Community Gardens USA <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, May 9, 2009 8:29:56 AM
Subject: [Community_garden] Organize Campaign Supporting Will
Allen's Call for Centers for Urban Agriculture
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the National
Recovery
Act, I and members of my staff brainstormed ideas for a meaningful
stimulus
package aimed at creating green jobs, shoring up the security of our
urban
food systems, and promoting sound food policies of national scope. The
outcome needed to be both ?shovel-ready? for immediate impact and
sustainable for future growth.
We produced a proposal for the creation of a public-private enabling
institution called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. It would
incorporate a
national training and outreach center, a large working urban
farmstead, a
research and development center, a policy institute, and a
state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into
which all of
these elements would be combined in a functioning community food
system
scaled to the needs of a large city.
We proposed that this working institution ? not a ?think tank? but
a ?do
tank? ? be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already
created an
operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers
would
become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be
the hub
of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would
provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food
distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and
security.
This proposal was forwarded in February to our highest officials at
the
city, state and federal level, and it was greeted with considerable
approval. Unfortunately, however, it soon became clear that the way
Congress
had structured the stimulus package, with funds earmarked for only
particular sectors of the economy, chiefly infrastructure, afforded
neither
our Congressional representatives nor our local leaders with the
discretion
to direct any significant funds to this innovative plan. It simply
had not
occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job creation was
plausible in
a field such as community-based agriculture.
I am asking Congress today to rectify that oversight, whether by
modifying
the current guidelines of the Recovery Act or by designating new and
dedicated funds to the development of community food systems through
the
creation of this national Centers for Urban Agriculture.
---
Anyone up for brainstorming ways of advancing this concept?
Godsil, Board Member
Growing Power
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090509/168ccbfc/attachment.html
>
_______________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one
of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the
ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org
To post an e-mail to the list:? [email protected]
To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:?
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.communitygarden.org/pipermail/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org/attachments/20090509/be0e53e9/attachment.html
>
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
The American Community Gardening Association listserve is only one
of ACGA's services to community gardeners. To learn more about the
ACGA and to find out how to join, please go to http://www.communitygarden.org
To post an e-mail to the list: [email protected]
To subscribe, unsubscribe or change your subscription:
http://list.communitygarden.org/mailman/listinfo/community_garden_list.communitygarden.org
End of Community_garden Digest, Vol 742, Issue 1
************************************************
