{"id":488,"date":"2018-11-11T06:19:44","date_gmt":"2018-11-11T06:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488"},"modified":"2018-11-11T06:19:44","modified_gmt":"2018-11-11T06:19:44","slug":"how-does-your-garden-grow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488","title":{"rendered":"How does your garden grow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

*Originally published in Worcester Magazine on\u00a0Aug\u00a02,\u00a02012<\/a><\/p>\n

Carmen Dejesus had never tended to a garden before, but learning to do so seemed like the best option to provide her family with fresh produce. \u201cThis garden means a lot to me,\u201d says Dejesus, one of the residents who maintain a garden bed behind a Laurel Street complex within Plumley Village. \u201cI come out and share it with everyone, and we all get together and help each other, and it gives us a sense of community.\u201d To most residents, the sense of community within a 1,400 family residency is invaluable.<\/p>\n

Carmen Dejesus had never tended to a garden before, but learning to do so seemed like the best option to provide her family with fresh produce. \u201cThis garden means a lot to me,\u201d says Dejesus, one of the residents who maintain a garden bed behind a Laurel Street complex within Plumley Village. \u201cI come out and share it with everyone, and we all get together and help each other, and it gives us a sense of community.\u201d To most residents, the sense of community within a 1,400 family residency is invaluable.<\/p>\n

The Plumley Village Community Garden began as a resident-led initiative inspired by the Plumley Village Women\u2019s Group to bring fresh produce to the Plumley Village neighborhood. Now in its second year, the community garden is in full bloom and residents are able to provide fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs to a neighborhood that lacks walking distance access to affordable produce. In neighborhoods like Plumley Village, not having access to nutritional produce is a rising concern. Without an affordable produce market nearby, many families have to make the hard choice of feeding their families lower quality foods in order to stay within their financial means, which often has devastating consequences on their health. According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Worcester children are overweight at higher rates than the entire state as a whole. In information collected over recent years, 59 percent of Massachusetts adults were reported to be above a healthy weight versus an increased 63 percent in the city of Worcester alone.<\/p>\n

The plan to take an underutilized space and turn it into a garden did not happen overnight. Sharon Lindgren, community relations literacy coordinator at UMass Memorial, started working with the Plumley residents five years ago when she began a parent and child program and many of the residents expressed a desire for more health-based programs. \u201cThere was no farmers\u2019 market, or if there was a farmers\u2019 market it was too expensive. They really wanted to grow their own produce,\u201d notes Lindgren. When the need for access to fresh produce in the neighborhood was identified, it still took three years and the work of many organizations to increase their options for healthy alternatives and to create a garden that is shared by 24 families for their own personal use.<\/p>\n

UMass Memorial has an overwhelmingly positive role within the community with its effort to combat obesity at a local level. Aside from its partnership alongside the Carpenters Union, Roots Project, Youth in Charge as well as many other organizations that have helped to establish the Plumley Community Garden, UMass Memorial has worked with City Manager Michael O\u2019Brien to give children access to physical activity with the Wheels to Water program. Monica Lowell, vice president of community relations at UMass Memorial explains that trying to address a broadbased subject like obesity requires many organizations to work together. \u201cThis is a community effort, we cannot do it alone. You have the health center to serve the patient population. There are policies that the health department is going to be looking at and everybody needs to own this; we cannot solve this by ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

UMass Memorial has also collaborated with a number of organizations such as the Worcester Department of Public Health, Common Pathways and others to launch the City of Worcester Community Health Improvement Initiative. The aim of the initiative is to create a social, economic and health profile for the city and prioritize areas for health improvement in the community. This is known as the Community Health Improvement Plan\u2014 it is a community-wide, collaborative effort that will be significant for health improvement and to engage partners and organizations to develop, support and implement health-based goals.<\/p>\n

The residents at Plumley Village are ready to take charge of their health and community. Maria Cotto, director of property management at Plumley Village, says that every year the list for a garden plot is growing and that now there is even a wait list to get one of the precious spots. In the short-term future, they will be looking at building a couple of other gardens around the property. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to utilize a lot of the space so the residents can have a piece of their own,\u201d explains Cotto. \u201cPeople are more respectful, more concerned, more involved, and it is just positive all around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

*Originally published in Worcester Magazine on\u00a0Aug\u00a02,\u00a02012 Carmen Dejesus had never tended to a garden before, but learning to do so seemed like the best option to provide her family with fresh produce. \u201cThis garden means a lot to me,\u201d says Dejesus, one of the residents who maintain a garden bed behind a Laurel Street complex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow does your garden grow? -<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How does your garden grow? -\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"*Originally published in Worcester Magazine on\u00a0Aug\u00a02,\u00a02012 Carmen Dejesus had never tended to a garden before, but learning to do so seemed like the best option to provide her family with fresh produce. \u201cThis garden means a lot to me,\u201d says Dejesus, one of the residents who maintain a garden bed behind a Laurel Street complex […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/meaghanhardylavoie\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-11-11T06:19:44+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@MLHL84\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@MLHL84\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/\",\"name\":\"Meaghan Hardy-Lavoie\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/hardy-lavoie.com\/?p=488\",\"name\":\"How does your garden grow? 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