Our Purpose

The Buena Vista Community Garden exists as a model of holistic health and well-being for people and planet, a means of alleviating environmental justice burdens on the immediate community, restoring ecological health and well-being in support of climate change mitigation, as well as food justice and healthy food access for a low-income community.

The garden is rooted in principles of ecological design, community engagement and well-being, inclusivity, accessibility, equity, and community empowerment. We do not use any chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers in our garden.

We chose to embrace a whole farm ecological design utilizing collective community management, rather than the traditional individual plot model, in order to avoid challenges and nuances of individual plots, and practice serving the farm as a whole ecology, to share in the ups and downs of harvest productivity, and to practice making decisions together, integrating and making space for individual requests within the collective.

Through ecological design, we can:

• restore biodiversity and wildlife habitat to support pest management and pollinator health, which increases farm productivity

• build healthy soils to sequester Carbon in the soil, reduce waste, maintain food production, conserve water, suppress disease, and revitalize the microbial ecology

All of our outreach and programming is conducted in English and Spanish to ensure the immediate neighbors receive communication from us and feel comfortable participating and learning with us. The space facilitates community well-being by offering meaningful connection in working together, access to nature and a healing environment, opportunities for events and educational programming around the arts, dance, ecology, nutrition, environmental justice, and more.