Increasing Exposure to Green Career Pathways in the Valverde neighborhood

Brief History

In 2022, beloved community member Evon Lopez identified the need for access to healthy food, community gardens, and good green jobs within the Valverde neighborhood. With these evident needs and her passion Evon began to envision, what is now called, Gals Who Garden. Through a partnership with the University of Denver, they began identifying key support partners for the coalition. You can read more about the past milestones on the Gals Who Garden website.

Art and Evon Lopez

Partners

Without the support and hard work of people across many sectors this project would not be happening. Before going more in-depth we would like to name some of the other collaborators: Florence Crittenton High School, The Park People, University of Denver Center for Community Engagement to Advance Scholarship and Learning, Valverde Neighborhood Association, University of Colorado, Accelerate Neighborhood Climate Action.

West-Bar-Val-Wood Park Clean Up Event

Present

Flash forward to now. The Gals Who Garden collective has secured funding to begin breaking ground! This summer, thanks to a Kids Gardening grant, we were able to replace the fence, input substantial irrigation and begin to add crusher fines. The obvious next phase of this project is to build garden beds, and plant perennials such as trees, herbs and other pollinator plants. In addition to building out the space, SustainEd Farms will hire student interns, from Florence Crittenton High School to support the maintenance of the garden as well as learn about different green career pathways.

We are excited to share this project, for several reasons. First, is that the Gals Who Garden initiative has worked tirelessly for three years to increase access to green space for the residents of the Valverde neighborhood. While there is still much work to be done we also believe in the power of celebrating the present!

Current bare lot on the side of FloCrit. This will be where the food forest thrives.

Near Future

• Recently, SustainEd Farms secured grant funding from CASR (Climate Action Sustainability and Resiliency), part of Denver's Office of Climate Action, to support Green Workforce Development, specifically within the Valverde neighborhood! In practice this will look like members from the Valverde neighborhood being paid to mentor the also paid FloCrit interns. These mentors will include arborists, gardeners and many others who are experts in their environmentally focused fields.

• On September 27th from 9am-12pm the Gals Who Garden Initiative will be hosting a Fiesta! This event will be hosted in the Florence Crittenton garden space. To learn more, click here.

The University of Denver has hosted several groups to collect data on what students would like to see and how they would like to participate in their school garden.

Why the emphasis on payment?

This is a question that we have received as we share about our paid high school internships and now paid mentorships. While we do believe that there are knowledgeable community members out there who would happily volunteer their time we believe that people should be fairly compensated for their efforts. Knowledge sharing from elders to youth has been a deep rooted tradition for millennia allowing cultural practices, stories and much more to live on into the future. We recognize that too often unpaid labor, especially that provided by BIPOC folks and others who have been historically marginalized is relied upon heavily. In order to break that pattern we believe that if we are asking community members to do something for a set period of time we should also offer them fair compensation. Similarly for our high school interns. The students who attend Florence Crittenton High School are pregnant or teen moms. Allowing these students to gain experience and exposure to green career pathways affords them more opportunities to support themselves and their child(ren) while also fostering relationships with community mentors.

Support

We would love to see you at the fiesta in September! If you are unable to make it please consider donating to the project. If financial support is not realistic for your situation we invite you to follow us on social media and share our project updates with your followers! We truly believe that all contribution amounts and engagement is valuable and will support the progress of this project.