UMich Student Founds Community Garden To Help Refugees

While many University of Michigan students are often encouraged by local protests, LSA student activist Kim Owens has taken a different approach to student activism. To help refugees living in the Washtenaw area, Owens established a community garden in December 2021 in partnership with Mattei Botanical Gardens, Nichols Arboretum, and Jewish Family Services Ann Arbor.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Owens said the project was inspired by his experience as a refugee in the 1980s, when his family didn't have access to traditional cultural food ingredients from their home country of Laos.

"There was no globalization in the 1980s," says Owens. "Probably the most luxurious thing [you] would find at the grocery store was cilantro. You go to the grocery store now, you see dragon fruit, you see mangoes, you see all kinds of herbs. wasn't popular or sold out at your local grocery store (in the 80's)."

Owens said international ingredients may be more accessible today than they were in the 1980s, but transportation and language barriers remain.

"As a refugee, you don't know English," Owens said. “You have to have a driver’s license, all that good stuff. These are truly unresolved issues for the refugee community in terms of access to transportation and food.”

After graduating, Owens said she plans to continue her activism while pursuing a master's degree from the university's School of Social Work with a focus on refugee communities. While his current focus is on improving food security to meet the basic needs of refugees, Owens plans to focus on more complex issues in the future.

"If we're going to talk about other social issues, let's talk about the basics first," Owens said. "My thought was, 'If I can get everyone to sit down and share a meal and talk about food, then we can talk about other social issues together.'"

Owens said she reached out to Jewish Family Services, an organization that works to resettle refugees in the Ann Arbor area, to get involved in their community garden project. Owens said he applied to Mata Botanical Gardens after learning that many applicants needed to own the land for their projects.

After hearing about Owen's proposal in 2021, UM Campus Farm program director Jeremy Muktadir told The Daily he consulted with Matta Botanical Gardens director Anthony Kalinich before signing a four-year deal for the 21,000 square meters . Ease. Land for a refugee garden. Moghtadir said the influx of Afghan refugees into Michigan in the summer of 2022 created urgency to start the project ahead of the growing season.

"A large number of Afghan refugees have arrived in the United States under emergency conditions," he said. The question was: can we get this park up and running fast enough to get people going and have a chance to try it out last year? "

Ivana Lopez-Espinosa, director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Mathai Botanic Gardens (MBG), told The Daily how MBG management provides full logistical support to Jewish families and garden services in refugees.

"(We) are checking availability and contacting MBG and the staff to see what rooms are open and when they're open," Lopez-Espinosa said. The materials and facility needed to ensure they can host and host events when required. »

After the land was created for use on the campus farm, Owens said, Jewish Family Services recently received a three-year, $100,000 grant from the Refugee Farming Partnership Program to fund the garden.

Owens said the grant will help the park overcome challenges it faced during its pilot summer, such as: B. a shortage of volunteers, equipment and supplies.

"We were fortunate that Campus Farms donated leftovers from the sale of their plants," Owens said. “We could start the garden with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and things like that. Then (we) had problems with the volunteers because it was so new, so new (and) we didn't have the manpower to help. "

Moghtadar said the grant will allow Jewish Family and Refugee Garden Services to offer a variety of services to refugee clients, including clients selling their produce at the campus farm.

"(The participants) will produce food for their own consumption and they will have the opportunity (to sell the products)," Moghtadar said. “JFS has booths at some of the farmers markets in this area where … some of their customers were selling crafts or something. So we offer the site. It is up to them what they do with their products.”

Owens said that in addition to increasing food security in the refugee community, the Garden will take other initiatives in the future to improve the physical and mental well-being of refugees, and encouraged Ann Arbor and members of the UM community to get involved.

"We want to do more than gardening," Owens said. We also want to explore mental health, therapy, art and entrepreneurship. There are tons of ingredients for this project...it takes a whole village to do it all, so the more hands the merrier. "

Moghtadar said he looks forward to working with JFS for the remaining three years of the property deal. Campus Farm will continuously assess space needs and provide logistical support for refugee gardens, he said.

"Our job is to work together (with refugee gardens), provide physical space and technical support in agriculture," Moghtadar said. "And to make sure they have infrastructure that works there, like water and other things they need to grow their crops."

Lopez-Espinosa said the Mathai Botanical Garden is working on logistics for next summer, the first summer they will operate with the grant.

"A lot of what's happening right now is building the internal structure so we know which employees can handle the different aspects of the park," Lopez-Espinosa said. "So make sure we're communicating with our staff throughout the season to make sure we figure out who can help, support and contribute and what the potential timeline is."

Lopez-Espinosa said she expects her partnership with Refugee Park to be different this summer, largely because of the strong relationship with JFS and the improved organization of the program.

"I think we're going to start with a customer group model, so there will be different groups throughout the agricultural program," Lopez-Espinosa said. “We're going to have eight weeks where we're going to have customers. It's going to be great for customers at the end of the eight weeks... to feel able to use the space to go back and continue gardening and harvesting throughout the season. "

Mugtadir said Campus Farm's relationship with Owens and JFS is consistent with Matthias Botanic Garden's strategic plan.

The strategic plan states that Mattae Botanic Gardens aims to foster partnerships that improve sustainable practices in the natural environment. In a letter released in 2021, Kolnick expanded the goals to better integrate the environmental priorities and practices of Indigenous communities in the Ann Arbor area and built on the university's sustainability goals.

"MBGNA is committed to promoting fairness and justice and will continue to share the history of its live and private groups," the letter reads. “This strategic plan is our roadmap for turning that commitment into action. How MBGNA will continue to examine and challenge its complicity with systemic injustices and how we will break new ground with historically marginalized communities in the years to come.

Owens said that although she won't be involved with the project until after she enters college, she believes it has started an important conversation about the importance of access to food in refugee communities.

Upon leaving Refugee Gardens, Owens said he would start another nonprofit called Age to Impact, which aims to resolve age disputes on the UM campus.

"I'm trying to stay here at the University of Michigan," Owens said. "I am an older, non-traditional student who demands that my upbringing be fair and that I be as teachable as everyone else."

Owens once said in graduate school that he wanted to approach the issues facing refugee communities through a political lens while working to include them in discussions about changing the law.

"I truly believe that the people affected by change are the best people to bring about change," said Owens. So when you create a refugee policy, you need to include your elements. You have to involve the stakeholders and you have to involve the refugees and ask them: because they will survive.”

Daily reporter Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu .