Coalition seeks volunteers, aid for community gardens project
Everyone within Yuma can take their hand at developing a green thumb if plans by local primary care physician Sergio Penaherrera and Yuma County Public Health Department nutritional program coordinator Suzanne Cooper come to fruition to create community gardens.
Working under the umbrella organization, Yuma H.E.A.L. (Health, Environment, Agriculture and Learning) Coalition, of which the Yuma County Health Department is the lead agency, Penaherrera and Cooper have set the plans in motion to create the gardens.
“This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Penaherrera said. “I came and I approached Suzanne about three or four months ago and she was way ahead of me. She, likewise, had been thinking about starting a community garden and had done quite a bit of research. We just started talking and exchanging ideas about the mission and the role of the community garden and how to go about getting this together.”
Then, both Penaherrera and Cooper involved a committee, Yuma H.E.AL., which is a multi-sector collaborative membership comprised of public and private agencies and individuals who “share an interest in the creation and development of community food gardens and related health promoting projects and activities,” according to Cooper.
The Public Health Law Center website showed that while community gardens come in various forms, they “at their core are defined as any piece of land, either publicly or privately owned, where plants are grown and maintained by a group of people in the community.”
The gardens are to serve as sources of fresh produce, places for physical exercise, community gathering sites and educational places. Cooper noted the gardens can also serve to better the emotional wellbeing of the community by enhancing social interaction.
The garden itself can be made up of various plants and vegetables from kale to cabbage as well as produce that is currently grown in Yuma commercially, Penaherrera said.
“An asset of being in Yuma is that we can have something growing for most of the year,” he said.
Additional benefits listed by “Designing Healthy Communities,” a book by national health expert Dr. Richard Jackson, include the improved overall health of participants attributable to reduced stress levels, healthier eating and increased physical activity, lower family food budgets due to access to inexpensive fresh fruits and vegetables, possibility for employment, economic development and neighborhood revitalization and preservation of neighborhood green space.
“There are all kinds of different benefits aside from the obvious of having access to healthy foodwhich a lot of times people don’t have which is kind of ironic when you think about how we live in an agricultural community,” Cooper said. “There is obviously a lot of food here but availability doesn’t always equal accessibility for people. Just because you have a field near your backyard doesn’t mean you can just go and pick it.”
While both Penaherrera and Cooper would like to implement gardens in underserved areas of Yuma, which include those with low income residents and areas that have less access to grocery stores and fresh produce, Cooper noted that the gardens would be benefit “anyone in any area of Yuma.”
“Our goal initially is to implement a full-fledged community garden and hopefully it will be a springboard to a lot of other health promoting projects,” Cooper said. “The initial garden can also serve as a demonstration garden for other potential community gardens for Yuma.”
Penaherra added the gardens can help shift the community’s perspective on nutrition.
“The important function also is to change the relationship that people have with food,” Penaherrera said. “I think that’s been distorted somewhat because of the fact that we have delegated food production to corporations. We need to change that relationship so that people view food as not just a sustenance but as an asset or way of healing ourselves.”
Cooper noted the gardens can also beautify a community as flowers can be planted to improve the ecosystem of the produce it surrounds. Because Yuma is made up of people with many different backgrounds, she added residents can incorporate plants from their homelands and respective cultures to create a diverse garden.
“It is important for people to feel empowered and to feel that they can have some self-sustainability for themselves and their families,” Cooper said. “I think community gardens afford people that opportunity along with skill building.”
Cooper explained the garden can be an educational spot for those who do not know how to garden. She said the coalition has “master gardeners” on board to assist with the project.
Yuma H.E.A.L. is presently searching for volunteers and community input on developing and selecting an area for the first community garden to be born.
“We are also looking for donors,” Cooper said. “We worked so that we are able to receive direct donations from those that might be interested in doing so.”
Cooper said the goal is to have the first garden in operation in a year.
“We want to make sure this garden is successful,” Cooper stated. “We want it to be sustainable and we don’t want to just put it together.”
For more information on how to contribute to the community garden project, contact Copper at suzanne. cooper@yumacountyaz.gov or call (928) 317-4632.