Developing Urban Agriculture and Social Capital in Toledo - By Rubin Paterson, Ph.D.

Rubin Patterson, Ph.D.
For the past six years, E has served as executive director of TCDC. This organization works in collaboration with citizens of contiguous census tracts that have the following troubling characteristics: a poverty rate three times that of the national average; a median household income half that of the national average and a college graduation rate only one-fifth of the national average rate. The community is also dotted with several brown field sites. TCDC has had an impact on the community in terms of addressing urban blight, enhancing homeownership and building a civil society.

A brilliant and energetic social entrepreneur, E cleverly and skillfully marshals the right mix of resources to maximize positive social impacts on behalf of the people in her service area. She has now embarked upon urban agriculture. Under E's leadership, TCDC is now founding the Fernwood Growing Center (FGC), which will have the impacts discussed below.

Especially noteworthy, E managed to get a $200,000 Brown Field Cleanup Grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency and another $50,000 from the Toledo Port Authority Pre-development Grant and the Ohio Community Development Finance Fund. These funds were used to conduct environmental remediation on a two-acre donated brown field site and to generate a business plan. FGC will house four large hoop houses with an aggregate growing space larger than a football field. The business plan details the development of aquaponics farming, where tilapia and an assortment of greens and herbs will be produced in raised beds.

TCDC also commissioned a study that mapped food-purchasing patterns among people in the TCDC service community, particularly their pattern of purchasing fresh produce.  Although residents report consuming beans, potatoes, cabbage and other types of greens, they also reported that they would consume much more of such produce if they didn't have to travel more than two miles--out of their food desert--to purchase them and if they were less expensive. Price and distance are major issues in that more than one in three households is in poverty and nearly one in five households in the community does not have a vehicle.

The study also surveyed restaurants and grocery stores around the city to acquire information about their potential for purchasing from FGC. E's vision is for FGC to employ approximately 25 community residents, increase consumption of fresh produce in the community, improve citizens' knowledge of healthy food preparation and consumption and acquire a sense of stewardship regarding their environment. Many lives are going to be improved dramatically due to the FGC. Consider the following. Approximately two-thirds of families with children under five years of age in the TCDC service area are impoverished.  Now combine that community statistic with the medical fact that the brain uses 60 percent of total nutritional energy consumed by infants, and the brain continues to grow rapidly until children are about the age of five.

Undernourished small children with insufficient energy to fuel brain growth can experience stunted cognitive development, which manifests itself in attention, comprehension, learning, memory and other impairments. In the community, untold stunting of human potential is quietly taking place in many impoverished families with small children.

Food consumption enhancement is one benefit of FGC; another is social capital. Social capital is critically important because an urban garden alone cannot address all the ills confronting the community. FGC and other community gardens can help generate social capital as a form of positive reciprocity: I do for you as you do for me. The existing negative reciprocity is thereby reversed: I do to you what you do to me. In other words, social capital fosters the mobilization of solidarity.

Social capital is particularly scarce in TCDC-type census tracts all over the United States, which are the very communities that need it the most. The people of those communities suffer doubly because they lack material resources to get ahead (e.g., jobs and quality education) - which come primarily from outside the community - and they lack the in-community social resources (e.g., networking, trust, and broadly empowering community-based organizations) that can best enable them to collectively amass the external material resources that are so gravely needed.

Finally, FGC will also provide classes for local residents. The University of Toledo's new Center for Sustainable Urban Ecology will assist FGC. The classes will introduce residents - on the FGC premises - to methods for improving their nutrition; growing their own urban garden; joining the urban agricultural movement; acquiring brown field remediation job training skills and reimagining and rebuilding urban communities that have been devastated by capitalist disinvestment. 

The community, humanitarians and frankly anyone with a heart should want to reach out and give E. Michelle Mickens  a "great big ole hug" for her efforts in founding the Fernwood Growing Center.

Rubin Patterson, Ph.D., is professor of Sociology, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and director of Africana Studies at The University of Toledo.