#internship16

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Background info on  the community of Encanto

Nearing our end of our intership tenure, it is now possible to give a brief background information on the community of Encanto, based on our own experiences and a wide range of interviews conducted within the community.

The general external view on Encanto is somewhat out of sync with the real state of affairs within the community, which supports our earlier hypothesis based on teaching the children, in that Encanto in actual fact has a lot of strengths and assets.

Firstly, according to the city of San Diego retail analysis from 2015, the Encanto neighborhoods have what they call the 1 billion retail opportunity, because of the existence of a huge gap between supply and demand within the area. This gap primarily stems from unwillingness from external businesses to invest in Encanto, given its negative and stigmatized reputation. In effect, the community members have been forced to seek for groceries and goods outside the community borders, because the services are not available within the community itself – ultimately draining the area of financial resources equating to 1 billion dollars annually. However, on the flip side, this gap offers business owners a huge business opportunity given that the market is open.

Additionally, the community also possesses an abundance of cultural diversity and cultural wealth. While, complications also are attached to this diversity, it also makes the community an extremely vibrant and culturally accepting one; dispelling negative stereotypes and personal biases.  

Conclusively, the community demographics are centered around youth, seeing that the median age of the community is 29,6 years old, compared to the 34,7 of San Diego county, meaning that it’s an up and coming community with a lot of potential. Touching upon this, it was a common focus and persisting goal of the local CBOs to help further the education of this young population. In actual fact, education was usually the primary avenue through which the local CBOs would centre their community engagement.

Identifying and acknowledging these qualities and strengths within the community, and in turn building upon them – in effect building capacity within the community was a central theme among these organizations. Instead of using a deficit model, an asset model was used, which centres around using positive reinforcement instead of focussing on all the negative aspects of the community. In addition, different degrees of participatory approaches to community engagement were used by all the different organizations. A perfect example of this was when the local plaza, The Market Creek Plaza, was designed and erected in 2012. The most dominating CBO involved in the project was the Jacobs Center for Neighbourhood Innovation (JCNI), who established 8 design teams, consisting of numerous community members, as to give the community a voice and a sense of stewardship and ownership of the project. The product of this approach can clearly be seen throughout the plaza, where the architecture and décor visibly reflects the immense cultural diversity that exists within the community, including African, different Asian, South American inspirations among others. Furthermore, it was the vision of JCNI and collaborating organizations/stakeholders, that the plaza should primarily have local businesses and staff. While, the local businesses has yet to establish themselves, more than 90% of the staff originates from the local community, in turn providing jobs and income for the community. The plaza has also managed to attract nationwide mainstay business chains to the plaza, like “Food 4 less”, “Subway”, and “Starbucks” to name a few. This could be a step in the right direction in terms of attracting external businesses to the community in order to fill the “Gap”, discussed earlier between supply and demand that exists within Encanto. However, it is important to note and understand the potential crucial impact generating more local businesses would have, both within the plaza as well as within the community itself, towards improving the financial landscape of the area. The return on having more local businesses is multifaceted and would have a myriad of benefits.

Some of the challenges that the JCNI faces, is the management of the plaza, being that the JCNI has allocated 5 years for the upstart and supervision of the erection of the plaza. This means that during 2017, the community themselves will have take over the management of the plaza, with all that that entails. Talking to Sandra Ainslie from JCNI, the transition marks a key challenge for the organization, and is something they are working hard to make as smooth as possible.

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Here’s the final video from the BLUM internship tenure, a summer program for UCSD (University California San Diego) students, which took place at the Earthlab. Gives a good insight into everyday life at the Earthlab while giving different perspectives from key members of Groundworks and others.

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Hitting the mark and reaching our learning goals

During the preparation phase of our internship, we, in collaboration with our internship supervisor, established a set of learning objectives that should be obtained throughout our internship tenure.

Upon completion, we had 5 learning goals in total that stretched across the whole spectrum on the taxonomical level.

The first one was to gain experience and insight into how a community garden is run and which challenges and barriers exist within such a setting. This knowledge has been slowly gained through the whole experience, doing informal interviews with a myriad of actors within the local community garden scene, in turn stemming from a large host of individual community gardens. It’s been very interesting to experience different perspectives on the matter, However, we have indeed learned a lot talking to the members of our own internship organization, Groundworks San Diego. One of the biggest challenges of running a community garden, is the organizational aspect, and how it is set up. You absolutely need a rock solid foundation of members that are willing to put a lot of time and energy in the project, because starting a community garden is a lot of work without seeing the fruit of that labor immediately. Therefore, it is very important to have a long term perspective.A lot of community gardens fail in its initial phase because of this very reason.

Another learning objective we had was to gain knowledge about the food availability and accessibility in the area. While we already have conducted several interviews, we will continue to do so, as well as handing out questionnaires in order to gain additional insight into the matter. Lastly, we have done secondary literature review and have produced a map of the food landscape of the area, where all outlets have been mapped to identify the proximity of these.

Lastly, we want to gain a more holistic understanding of how community gardens can address food insecurity both at the micro-cosm and macro-cosm level. We intend to compare and contrast the experiences we have made at the local level to what has been previously been done in other parts of the US. There is an expansive pool of knowledge and data attaining to the subject and many successful examples of community gardens having an impact on addressing food security in a plethora of communities.

During the remaining part of our stay here, we will complete a series of interviews with community members and relevant stakeholders. Also, the aforementioned questionnaire will be conducted and will be handed out to various community members, in order to get a proper insight into the current food security situation within the community.

Stay tuned.