Document(s) 17 of 34

Introduction

Organizations and professionals committed to promoting environmentally sound and economically rewarding agriculture are just beginning to understand the significance of farming in cities for long-term sustainability of agriculture and human settlements. People worldwide are asking these questions: How can we help urban livestock and crop production become a force to alleviate poverty and improve human nutrition and welfare? How can urban agriculture reach beyond beautification and environmental improvement, particularly in North American cities, and become a vehicle for the social and economic development of disenfranchised communities?

Heifer Project International (HPI) has for more than 50 years developed livestock projects in predominantly rural areas to improve the economic and social welfare of low-income families and communities. Seeking to apply its model for development in urban areas, it launched its first North American urban animal-agricultural initiative in Chicago in September 1996. Working with community groups, HPI provided training and assistance for agricultural projects in three neighbourhoods in Chicago with the highest levels of poverty, the most food banks, and no grocery stores.

The Robert Taylor Homes is the largest public-housing project in the United States. It covers 92 acres (37.2 ha) in Chicago’s South Side and has more than 20 000 residents. Considered one of the bleakest, most violent public-housing sites in Chicago, it is plagued by crime and poverty. Gangs control many of the 27 high-rise buildings. In this environment, a resident-run youth group constructed a vermi- and aquaculture system in the basement of one of the high-rises, establishing some 30 pounds (more than 13 kg) of worms and two barrels of fish. Worm castings are used in the planting season as a soil additive in the group’s small market garden or packaged for sale to other city gardeners. Every 7 months, the participants harvest the fish for their families. In neighbouring Cabrini Green public-housing complex, with large tracts of blighted land just minutes from the glittery business district, a small herd of dairy goats will soon be grazing and providing milk and raw materials for a goat-cheese microenterprise.

With these inroads barely paved, HPI is beginning to learn that urban agriculture can improve people’s lives and natural surroundings. However, agricultural practice alone cannot improve nutrition, create a skilled and responsible work force, and reclaim land. These depend on the approach taken to urban agriculture. What combination of elements brings about long-lasting change? How can people climb out of poverty, instead of just temporarily dodging it like mines in a cornfield in a never-ending war? In its work around the world, HPI has learned that any approach to development

must be people centred and responsive to a community’s self-evaluated needs and assets.

In this paper, I will present the core elements of HPI’s model for planning urban agricultural projects, which enables communities to define and shape their own development goals. The model has four principle components: the interdependence of the land- and lifescape, full participation of intended beneficiaries, a planning and evaluation process rooted in the community’s values, and a method called “passing on the gift,” designed to ensure that families and communities maintain the project through practical care and sharing.

Weaving together the land- and lifescape

The landscape has the biophysical qualities of a geographical region. The lifescape has the social, cultural, and economic qualities of the community. They come together in a whole-system view of an urban agricultural project or setting. Because change is never linear, thinking about change must be process oriented and holistic (Aaker et al. 1996). In urban agricultural projects, it is not enough to consider the health of the land, the species of plants or animal species that might live there, and the steps to environmental rehabilitation. We must also consider the lifescape: the market or local economy, the cultural setting, and the local need for such a project — in effect, the people who will build, benefit from, and maintain the project.

Urban agriculture provides intangible gifts, such as teaching these teenagers to take responsibility for sustaining life. It also provides economic opportunity and entrepreneurial capacity-building, such as in selling worm castings as fertilizer to the other city gardeners, making goat cheese, value added from herbs from their garden, and selling goat cheese to city restaurants or at local farmers’ markets. Urban agriculture improves city residents’ lifescape. A worm and fish farm in the basement of the Robert Taylor Homes provides an education. Urban agriculture also improves the landscape. Worm castings and composted goat manure enhance the soil fertility of nearby vegetable gardens.

HPI’s city projects embrace several interconnected goals:

• Environmental — Urban animal-agricultural projects work in concert with organic agriculture (manure and worm castings to increase soil fertility, bees for crop pollination, and chickens and rabbits to heat a greenhouse);

• Economic — Opportunities are provided to earn income through the sale of animal products (cheese, honey, poultry, eggs);

• Education — Opportunities are provided to learn new skills while learning about and reconnecting with one of our food sources;

• Empowerment — Urban agricultural projects help people gain control of community and family food security (establishment of local markets, production and consumption at home, participation in community food kitchens or processing centres).

Participatory development

Participation in development has fallen into the same camp of popular rhetoric as sustainable development. It is discussed more often than it is put into practice or even understood. Fundamentally, participation is rooted in meaning, in what people care about. Participatory approaches to project development seek to identify people’s values and to make these values explicit to these people and their partners in the project.

Through participatory development, project partners can begin to acquire skills and motivation to challenge their economic, social, and political place in society, think strategically about change, and make progress. As Freire (1970) wrote in his pioneering work on pedagogy, the only valid transformation in a community is one in which people are not just liberated from hunger but made free, or enabled, to create, construct, and produce.

Experience has taught HPI that participation is not easy and takes time but is ultimately rewarding. It can increase a project’s longevity and improve the use of resources, both those existing within the community and those being introduced. For instance, a focus on livestock in city food-security projects presents a unique set of challenges, such as a perceived nuisance (odour, noise) and potential threats to the security of the animals. Having neighbours work with and educate neighbours has proven to be the most effective way to overcome those challenges. Participatory approaches to project development build relationships and trust over time, diminish the donor–recipient relationship, and emphasize the partner–partner relationship.

Most projects start with a needs assessment. Identifying a community’s needs — what resources they are lacking — is an important element in a good project design. However, a singular focus on needs identification emphasizes what is wrong with the community. Although neighbourhoods are often beset with crime, economic depression, and urban decay, they are also full of good leaders, caring and skilful people, vacant land, and other resources critical to a project’s success. A participatory-planning approach includes asset-mapping (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). What is it about this community that is good and strong? What resources does this community have to build on? Participation must ultimately engender local ownership of the decision-making process and project management, a commitment of local resources, and a belief in people’s capacities to bring about change (Aaker and Shumaker 1996). For a community-garden project, a truck-farming initiative, or an inner-city rabbitry to be successful, the process of engendering participation becomes, in effect, more important than the project itself. Participation is both a means and an end.

The idea that the process must precede the project has been a difficult one to promote or explain to people in HPI’s urban initiative in Chicago. Introducing animals into the city as a way to address community food security through consumption of the products at home and economic gain is an intriguing idea. One year after planning began, the Cabrini Green goat and oxen project is finally getting off the ground, with the imminent arrival of the animals. Planning took the form of frequent meetings and research. They would need a barn. Where would they find it? Venturing out of the housing project and getting to know the neighbours led to the discovery of a nearby carriage-horse stable with empty stalls. What regulations apply to the production and selling of cheese? Relationships had to be built with local agricultural departments and restaurants. What did they want to accomplish in this project? Did they want to make money, educate children, improve the neighbourhood, involve the local schools? Goals

were defined and redefined as new information was gathered. Who were their allies? How could they mobilize the city and their neighbours to support their project? Local city councillors and Chicago Housing Authority officials were invited to participate in discussions.

HPI field staff function as facilitators and participants. Community groups learn to organize themselves, develop a plan, get to know and trust each other, and engage in capacity-building. Building sustainable urban agricultural projects is first about engendering participation. The animals come later. “We’re not a livestock development organization, but a people development organization. We use livestock as the tool; many wonderful things happen as a result of people in a community coming together and working on a livestock project” (HPI 1996 p. 32).

Values-based planning

With a holistic perspective and the goal of full participation firmly in mind, the partners can begin planning the project. Values-based project planning begins with a vision of a future that grows out of the community’s shared values (Aaker and Shumaker 1996). Values that communities or project groups choose to identify collectively as central to their hopes and plans for the future are called the project’s cornerstones, the brick and mortar that support the structure as it develops, grows, and changes. Values-based planning, as HPI practices it, incorporates envisioning the future and evaluating the project.

The key to values-based planning is that it is a dynamic process. Managing the project often leads to redefining the situation, which leads to a different or slightly altered vision of what the community or group hopes to accomplish. HPI collaborates with groups that have been managing projects for more than 20 years. As new participants become involved, the project is encouraged to accommodate the personal visions that new participants bring with them. For instance, regional participants’ meetings occur annually in HPI’s USA–Canada Program. Project participants meet to share experiences of failure and success, stretch each other’s imagination, and support the process of questioning their own project’s effectiveness. In the early stages of a project, for instance, a group might identify learning to successfully maintain the health of dairy goats and their milk production as a way to achieve economic self-sufficiency; in later years, the activity grows to involve training in effective niche marketing to local restaurants and neighbours to reach the same value-based goal of economic self-reliance.

Values-based planning is like providing a group with well-made, time-tested, uncomplicated tools. The project participants are both the architects and the carpenters, drawing their own blueprints and crafting their own structure. This planning process is not foolproof and it takes time, but this gives it the potential to build ownership and project longevity.

Passing on the gift

Passing on the gift is one of the cornerstones that HPI relies on to govern its own vision for a world in which local agriculture is a vehicle for eradicating hunger. As an act, passing on the gift refers to the contract between HPI and its project partners. Project participants are required to pass on some form of the gift they have received from HPI.

The Robert Taylor Homes youth will provide to new youth entering the project a pound of worms for each pound they received. They will also serve as mentors, passing on the knowledge they gained in their training and experience. For instance, Robert Taylor Homes youth will conduct a hands-on training for youth in Milwaukee eager to learn to raise Tilapia spp. indoors in their inner city. Together, they will build the aquaculture system. By passing on the gift, HPI recipients become donors. As a value, passing on the gift captures the notion that we all have important resources to share, despite our circumstances, and that perhaps the greatest gift we can give someone else is the gift of life — metaphorically, in sharing something with and caring for another or, literally, in giving animal life.

Passing on the gift is an important management tool. It is a unique measure of accountability. The animals that HPI provides are a “living loan”; the contract is complete and the project partners have full ownership of the animals once they are passed to other project participants. Passing on the gift also contributes to the longevity and sustainability of the project. The project has less chance of becoming static as more people are brought into the circle to receive training and prepare for their animals, broadening the project and introducing their personal visions for a better life. For instance, the goat and oxen project in Cabrini Green will begin with six youth caring for two goats and two oxen. Four years later, 24 youth will be caring for and benefitting from at least six goats and two oxen. Passing on the gift helps to weave together the land- and lifescape. At its core, an animal relies on the land and also fortifies it. But the impact is also felt in the lifescape as neighbours organize, share a vision, work together, and enrich their economic and social lives.

References

Aaker, J., ed. 1994. Livestock for a small Earth: the role of animals in a just and sustainable world. Heifer Project International, Little Rock, AR, USA.

Aaker, J.; Shumaker, J. 1996. The cornerstones model: values-based planning and management. Heifer Project International, Little Rock, AR, USA.

Freire, P. 1970. The pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum Publishing Company, New York, NY, USA.

HPI (Heifer Project International). 1996. Can Mrs. O’Leary’s cow come home? Explorations in urban animal agriculture. HPI, Chicago Field Office, Chicago, IL, USA.

Kretzmann, J.P.; McKnight, J.L. 1993. Building communities from the inside out: a path toward finding and mobilizing a community’s assets. ACTA Publications, Chicago, IL, USA.

Document(s) 17 of 34