Riverfront Farm helps teens plant their own seeds of success

Jail, prison or any type of incarceration is a ticket to perpetual disenfranchisement, even after one gets out. Sometimes neighborhoods and families can function as prisons. Violence, oppression, the daily reminders of despair, inside a city where the haves are moving up and the poor are gaining ranks. But hope for kids about to take the wrong turn or about to plunge deep into a life of crime may be found in the turnips and sunflowers of their youth and middle passage. That’s what some community groups believe, who are trying to take over the ‘hood one pea patch after another. Connie and Pat Malone have opened up their West-Central home to become a model for this ethos that is the project of hope, and the gardening experience for kids offered at Riverfront Farms is about self-determination and reclamation for youth in a pretty shot-up neighborhood. “A garden always breaks down barriers,” she said, emphasizing that Riverfront Farms is about giving youth responsibility, even if it means standing there watering one of the five plots of land scattered across the West Central neighborhood. Fresh food — growing it, tending it, picking it, selling it a farmer’s market and cooking it – is a new rehabilitation technique Cool Hand Luke would have died for. Riverfront Farms is part of a diversion or redirection program that can give life back to gang members and others in a neighborhood that spreads out to Emerson-Garfield and Glover schools. The program has space for 11-to 18-year olds, and last year Connie said 60 eligible and wanting youth had to be turned away. The program is about connections, and the kids can earn up to $500 for a summer job if they stick to it, do the work and participate in the learning outcomes events held on Fridays. That’s Monday through Friday, averaging 15 hours a week, without problems, and you get your $500. Each summer a kid sticks it out means more money in their pocket. When you turn 18 and put in the summer hours, $1,000 is the reward. Last year 21 youth participated. The green thumb aspect isn’t just focused on tending flowers, veggies and fruit. Riverfront Farms a la Project Hope runs a lawn care business. Other experts from the community donate their time to talk to the urban farmers about everything from bees and composting to alternative energy. Connie’s serious about the green collar job angle along with getting kids living in high-risk neighborhoods and a part of dysfunctional families to learn more than just skills with a shovel and mower. It’s about giving youth a place where people respect them and expect them to do work. “Jobs, Not Jails” is the overarching program that came out of Los Angeles which is Pat Malone’s overriding philosophy in life that he’s tied to the Riverfront Farms approach. In the West Central neighborhood, this attitude started with basketball. Connie Malone said that learning about a 15-year-old beaten to death and left on one of the many empty lots in the community and then a 2-year-old killed in the same neighborhood brought forward the idea of more direct intervention. Gangs aren’t salvation, but sometimes they are the only thing that makes sense to youth brought up in broken homes, with drug-addicted parents and guardians, or even worse, physically abusive people beating not only body but soul. That’s where Pat and Connie Malone brought in this soil philosophy, a sort of garden solace that ties into a universal truth of making things grow and reaping from that powerful process. Connie referenced Paul Fleischman’s “Seedfolks,” a novel about a junk-plagued and rat-guarded city lot transformed into an urban oasis. The process of that metamorphosis also changed lives and transformed spirits and souls. Connie saw the first Riverfront Farms Project Hope crew at five in 2007; then the next crew hit 17, and then 20 this summer. “We could easily have 500 youth in this area served by this sort of program,” she said. She repeated the influence of Seedfolks had on her and husband’s vision of fixing the West Central neighborhood, where the Malones raised two sons. They’ve donated that family home as part of the Project Hope/Riverfront Farms non-profit organization’s strategic plan to continue with the work, and to expand it. Here’s what Paul Fleischman says about garden power which was his book’s catalyst: “I sense that we all have hidden stores of generosity that find no outlet except in such moments of disaster. This was the marvel of the community gardens I visited. They were oases in the urban landscape of fear, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, charity, without need of an earthquake or hurricane. Television, I’m afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity. Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents to rebuilding that sense of belonging. It’s a potent seed. ‘I have great faith in a seed,” wrote Thoreau. “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.’” The dollars to pay those youth workers come from many sources, as do the materials and supplies to garden and engage in a professional lawn care program. Whitworth threw in some money in concert with others, as well as incorporating service learning. Whitworth students have been put to work as facilitators and supervisors. Campus Compact, a national coalition of college and university presidents, was one aspect of Whitworth’s involvement, including the Bonner Leaders Program, part of a civic engagement effort to get college students involved in community service. Some of the funding for Riverfront Farms came from that Students4Giving project. Connie stressed that empty lots and adjoining property have to be part of the West Central plan. She realizes that many families in the neighborhood – 80 percent — need access to healthy food. As she reiterated, the urban gardening program should and could be expanded exponentially. City leaders – not just stumping politicians – need to step up to the plate and see this “jobs not jails” paradigm as not only cost effective but empowering for a city’s lower income youth. The Farmer’s Market includes Vinegar Flats organic produce, items from New Leaf Bakery, Riverfront Farms products and other foodstuffs. “You think the city would be begging to get on board with the program,” she said. Killing the rabid dog that is boredom, crime and underachievement through city-sponsored and public-private arrangements would save us — the citizens of Spokane — all those millions of dollars that are doled out to pay for all the police, court, education, health and economic degradation costs the city absorbs, caused by dilapidated neighborhoods, including the collective spirit of their youth. It’s gotta be more than one garden at a time, and Connie and Pat Malone are working to push forward and make each rotting neighborhood whole again with kids with tools planting the seeds of hope right in their backyards.