SOWING LIFE-CHANGING SEEDS
Brenda Deckman had lots of jobs in her life. Nurse’s aide. Manager of a Subway sandwich shop. Home health care aide. Laundromat worker.
But after a turbulent marriage that ended with her losing custody of her 5-year-old son, she fell into a deep depression, spiraled downward and ended up homeless, living in a tent in the Pogonip Open Space Preserve, a 640-acre wooded park on the northern edge of Santa Cruz.
She had no car. No bike. Not even one photo of her son. Adrift, aimless and lacking self-worth, she survived on food stamps, panhandled and bathed in a creek.
“I was probably at the lowest point of my life. I had nothing,” Deckman said.
That was nearly four years ago. Deckman’s life turned around and she found new purpose after several of her friends mentioned that they had been hired at the Homeless Garden Project. Founded in 1990, the nonprofit organization runs a 3.5-acre farm near Highway 1 on Santa Cruz’s western edge.
The project hires 17 homeless people a year. They work 20 hours a week, are paid minimum wage and given a free lunch. Social workers provide counseling and help the “trainees,” as they are called, obtain health care, open bank accounts, enter alcohol and drug counseling and find a place to live.
Working the land, they grow more than 80 crops. Along the way, many find new purpose, focus and recovery.
Mike Erickson, now 55, was homeless as a teen in the early 1980s. He turned his life around and became a cabinet maker and woodworker in San Francisco, then an employee at the farm.
“People are homeless for so many different reasons,” he said. “Here they are part of a community. People experience rapid personal transformations. It’s a life-changer.”