Gardeners in Community Development helps refugees integrate into their new culture through its five gardens. Photos courtesy of Facebook.com/gardendallas.

Aug. 15, 2016

Gardeners in Community DevelopmentFor almost 30 years, community gardens in Dallas-Fort Worth have been making a difference in local resident’s lives. The oldest one in Dallas, the East Dallas Community Garden, had a unique mission when it was started in 1988 by the East Dallas Community Garden Alliance - to assist the large population of Southeast Asian refugees settled in Old East Dallas during the 1970s and 80s.

Don Lambert, right, founder of the Gardeners in Community Development at the East Dallas Community Garden farmers market. His wife Tiah is second from left. 

“Most of the Alliance members attended the opening, only a few others attended including myself and my wife and just a handful of neighbors and potential gardeners,” said Don Lambert, founder of Gardeners in Community Development, which now oversees the East Dallas Community Garden and four others.

Today, Gardeners in Community Development provides plots to not only Asian refugees, but also folks from Somalia, Yemen, Kurdistan and Democratic Republic of Congo. Besides East Dallas Community Garden, the network includes Peace Community Garden, which is currently closed for renovation; Live Oak Community Garden, the second to be opened; Our Savior Community Garden, which is the largest garden in the group with two acres; and Hope Community Garden. 

The gardens serve as a place the refugees can work and assimilate into American society, Lambert told the Dallas Morning News in 2013.

These days he spends his time at the Live Oak Community Garden, which is currently full of Nepali growers, who originated from Bhutan.  

“This is where I concentrate effort currently, as the EDCG group is doing a great job without much help,” he said.  

Lambert's experience and academic background combined with his green thumb prepared him to take over as director of the garden network. 

Gardeners in Community DevelopmentHe joined the Peace Corps and worked in agriculture for two years before earning a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1971 and a M.A. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkley in 1974. After receiving a PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley in 1981, he was teaching courses on Southeast Asian cultures at the University of Texas at Dallas and growing Asian vegetables in his backyard in Richardson, where he lived with his Malaysian-born wife Tiah. The agriculture members of the Alliance learned of his personal garden and used him as a consultant on how to grow Asian vegetables for a teaching garden for local refugees.

“As it turned out, the gardeners - mostly Cambodian and Laotian - that received plots planted a plethora of herbs and vegetables before the education program could get off the ground, and the planned extension program lacked the cultural and language expertise needed to get fully engaged,” Lambert explained. “For me, and many others it was a teaching garden all right, a place where we were welcome and could observe and learn from very skilled and experienced Asians growing some very interesting crops.”

He personally began to play a bigger role in 1992 when EDCG needed his help as the garden was having soil problems and a large section was abandoned. 

“The EDCG was a preeminent community gardening project, a garden that was and continues to be a model locally and nationally so seeing it fail was not something I could live with,” he said.  

Gardeners in Community DevelopmentFunds from a Meadows Foundation grant he put together to revitalize the garden took shape and since that time the garden has also been financially supported by Gardeners in Community Development, which was officially handed the responsibility of the EDCG by Save the Children in 1994. A variety of grants and local anonymous supporters also keep the garden running and the Communities Foundation of Texas donated the land to Gardeners in Community Development in 2004.  

“Our main ongoing support comes from an annual plant sale, public donations and plot fees paid by the gardeners,” said Lambert. “For the past three years, my wife and I have been selling community garden and vegetables from our own back yard at the Good Local Market Lakeside location on Saturdays to earn cash to cover shortfalls.”     

Currently EDCG sells its products in the garden on North Fitzhugh on Saturday mornings, meaning that the community garden has now sprung into a Farmer’s Market for all in the city to appreciate.

“The idea was to make the garden easy to maintain and so productive that garden output would enable growers easily pay for the water expense,” Lambert explained. “It worked and production quadrupled, the gardeners began selling vegetables daily from the garden, and they were happy to pay an annual plot fee to cover water and other basic costs.”

Over the past 30 years, Lambert says that the folks who use the garden have learned to be better stewards of the land developing production and marketing expertise appropriate for their goals operating within the Dallas setting.  

“The best thing about community gardens in older urban areas is their sheer obduracy — the grit and patience, the sweat equity involved in digging down through rubble to find real dirt again and bring it back to green abundance,” Lambert concludes. “A great example is this garden, four-tenths of an acre of serenity just off a noisy intersection in Old East Dallas,” referring to the Live Oak Community Garden. “In the early 90s it was an overflow garden for Cambodian refugees not able to find plots in the busy Southeast Asian refugee garden a few blocks away. Later abandoned and neglected, it has been adopted again by families fleeing turmoil in Bhutan.  You can wander in and watch them work their beds in rhythms and tones of ancient practice, their garden a soft prayer to our city's roaring heart.”

 

Gardens in Community Development

Below are the gardens overseen by the nonprofit.

Church of Our Saviour - 1616 N Jim Miller Road. Location of the Center for Growing People with family plots, greenhouse, chickens, fruit orchard, pantry farm and training facilities.

Hope Community Garden - 1108 Cristler. Small community garden that donates a major portion to a food pantry.

Peace Community Garden - 4627 Virginia. Small garden used primarily by a group of Laotian families.

East Dallas Community and Market Garden -1416 N Fitzhugh. A large garden with Cambodian growers that grow food to support their community and have an in-garden market the sells vegetables year around, especially on Saturday mornings.

Live Oak Community Garden - North Fitzhugh at Live Oak. A renewal project to add utility, garden space and training for new refugee families. Bhutanese gardeners are growing to support their personal communities, and marketing produce to supplement household incomes. 

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