Farmers Markets As Social Spaces

The first farmers markets of the season are just around the corner! The Wednesday Downtown Farmers and Artisans Market is opening in less than a week, with the Crescent City Farmers Market opening a few days later. It's time to get your veggies on! 

It's also time to dust off your market basket and visit with old friends because farmers markets are great "third places" in many communities, including ours. The concept of third places -- social spaces that are not work and not home -- was popularized by Ray Oldenburg in his book, The Great Good Place, in the late 1980s. Third places allow people to socialize with a cross-section of community in ways that are not bound by neighborhood or profession.

Farmers markets highlight many of the features of a classic third place:

• They are neutral ground. Nobody is required to be there (except the vendors) and it is free to enter.
• All members of a community can participate; third places often act as levelers, minimizing class barriers.
• Conversation is a major activity. If you look around a farmers market, you'll see conversations everywhere. People who rarely see each other or see each other only in formal settings, are able to chat, share recipes, catch up on grown children, or make plans for seeing each other again.
• They are accessible and accommodating. Farmers markets are often centrally located so that people can reach them easily and even walk or bike to them. 
• There are regulars and anyone can become a regular. If you are yourself a regular at the farmers market, you know that there are people you can count on seeing. Some of them are the vendors, but others are people you see at the market week in and week out.
• Third places are typically low key. They are wholesome and welcoming to all walks of life. You see young families, single adults, older couples...everyone can come to the market.
• Farmers markets are cheerful or playful, like other third places. Even though business is being transacted, it feels happier and less stressful than other errands and shopping trips. Vendors and customers build relationships.
• Third places become a home away from home. People look forward to returning and feel a sense of belonging and ownership. 

Third places are important centers for community life. At home, you see your family and immediate neighbors. At work, you interact with colleagues. In third places, you might see people from both home and work, but you also see parents of your children's friends, or their teachers; you see people from a job you left three years ago; you see friends from church or synagogue; you see the actors from the most recent local play; and you see people you recognize as your restaurant servers, supermarket checker, bank teller, and more.

Third places let us mingle and see our commonalities, while our immediate neighborhoods and work settings often divide us by economic class, race or ethnicity, and history.

I am definitely looking forward to buying fresh, local produce when the markets open next week. But I am equally excited to see the vendors again, to share recipes with people buying the same things I am buying, and to have a few minutes with a lot of great people I rarely see in my day to day life.

ag

"It All Turns On Affection"

Most readers of this blog have probably heard about the Building Healthy Communities work happening in Del Norte and the Adjacent Tribal Lands (DNATL). The BHC initiative is a project of The California Endowment, a private foundation dedicated to improving health in California. After many years of funding clinic initiatives and other one-time investments in many communities across the state, The California Endowment decided to try something different. What if, they asked, we invested heavily in a place for ten years? What if we worked with people living in that place to help them take ownership and view their place in a new way? What if a healthy community was built from the bottom up? What if, in other words, health became part of daily life in this place: of the people, by the people, and for the people? That is what Building Healthy Communities is all about: creating healthy places and healthy people.

One of the longtime champions of healthy people and places is the poet and essayist, Wendell Berry. In his essays extolling the love of a place and the people who care for it, Wendell Berry follows the path of one of his mentors, the writer Wallace Stegner. While Stegner created iconic works of the American West peopled by ranchers, miners, and pioneers, Berry's place is rural Kentucky and the people closest to his heart are small farmers tied to land for generations stretching back through time. His writings about the effects on community when small farmers are put out of business have affected my own understanding of farm communities for a couple of decades.

This is a very long way of saying that my heart skipped a beat this morning when I saw a headline that read, "Wendell Berry, American Hero". It sounded too much like a headline for an obituary. I'm not ready for Wendell Berry to die and, luckily, it was not the title of an obituary, but an article praising his ideas, his body of work, and the man himself.

In reading it, I learned that Wendell Berry was recently honored by being named the 2012 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment of the Humanities. His lecture, entitled It All Turns on Affection, was delivered earlier this month. I have been reading it in between other tasks this morning and am in awe of his ability to weave so many ideas, literary and ecological works, and histories into a single, coherent argument for the need for more affection in our lives.

In arguing for more affection, Berry does not just mean affection between people, although he does argue that we will more readily solve our community's problems when we have genuine empathy and caring for our neighbors. But he also means affection for our place and the trees, rocks, animals, and soil that create our place. In his Jefferson Lecture, he writes:

"For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy."

No-one could argue that DNATL doesn't have a unique character. How many places in the world bring together our beautiful rocky coast, redwood forests, wild rivers, and the spaces that live in between these habitats? For many decades, the economy in DNATL did, in part, survive by destroying a part of its unique character: the cutting down of the redwood forests. Through the Building Healthy Communities work, will we be able to imagine a new way of making a living from this place without destroying it?

Wendell Berry consistently makes a case for long-term caretaking of the earth, one small place at a time. His generations-old family farm tenure no doubt informs this view and he speaks in his lecture about the difference between "boomers" and "stickers". Boomers, in his view, are people who are always looking for the next prospect, always on the move, always searching for profit for the bottom line. Stickers, in contrast, "are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it."

I have only been in DNATL for about two and a half years, but I have met a lot of stickers here. People who smile at the ceaseless rain. People who can tuna, smoke salmon, gather and dry or freeze wild mushrooms. People who fight to keep Point St. George lighthouse from crumbling into the sea. People who work to make this place better for themselves and for their children. Some people are stickers because they have chosen this life because of their love of this place and the life it offers. I have met many others who are stickers because they have no escape; people who have lived in poverty for so long that leaving the county is financially unimaginable.

Our community will be stronger, better, and healthier when all the "stickers" are stickers by choice. If we can build a healthy community that offers opportunities for all residents, then our young people can stay here because they want to live HERE. Health can happen here, but "it all turns on affection". Can we, as a community, come together with enough affection for each other, for this place, and for our communities that we can build a local economy that honors that affection and creates a place for everyone?

That is the challenge of Building Healthy Communities. For decades, Wendell Berry has written about what healthy communities are and need and provide. As he nears the end of his eighth decade, if he has decided that affection is the key, I will walk down that path with him. In his lecture, he quotes his mentor Wallace Stegner to define stickers as "those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in." That is surely what we want here: that everyone loves the life the make and love that their life is made in DNATL.

May it be many more years before I really do see a headline for Wendell Berry's obituary.

Discovering Del Norte through Mealtime

Let me introduce myself. I'm Laura Jo, the new girl, CAN's newest AmeriCorps VISTA.

I was worried when I arrived in Crescent City. Worried there wouldn’t be any young people. Worried there wouldn’t be much in-town diversion. Worried, ultimately, that I’d be spending my evenings at home alone with stir-fried vegetables and rice while the rain came down in torrents outside my window.

Then I met a young person, another VISTA. I asked her what they did – was there a place to dance? Well, no. Not really. But I’d spend a lot of time at people’s houses, eating. And we could dance there, too, if we wanted.

She was right. First it was a small group of three in a white apartment. We shared pizza and salad. They shared with me, the good spots to eat, the good spots to see local music. Meantime, the group was growing. By the end we were nine. We were sharing travel experiences along with our pizza until talk moved on to the coming weekend and future meals to be had. That weekend it was ale and barbeque beef and oven roasted vegetables shared in a fire-warmed cabin on the Smith. We talked of chemistry and botany, of good hiking, of family and holidays. We talked about the next thing at the next house, the next meal.

 I had a couple nights of pasta after the pool, with old records playing in the background, cats and dogs snuggling up to my legs. I heard about what happened in which public meeting and who was heading up which thing.  We had a Sunday morning brunch of quiche and empanadas. We sipped our coffee and mimosas as we looked out at the river from large picture windows. We had a Sunday night “family dinner” of vegetable curry and flat bread. Then we took turns reading aloud in the orange glow of the woodstove.

She was right, that VISTA. I’ve been here for a mere three weeks, and I already feel a community is growing. Or rather, that I am being admitted into one that’s already alive, already here. Already I know there are places for me to visit, things to get involved in, people to share meals with. I discovered all this through mealtime.

Left: Connor Caldwell, Rachel McCain and Aaron Valley, a part of my new community, sharing pizza

We Have A Playground!

The playground for the Wellness Center is here! It's in a million pieces spread out between 89 boxes, crates, pallets, and giant carboard tubes. It's inside the former PCC building instead of outside where it can be played on, but it's here!

Bob the truck driver pulled into the parking lot about 24 hours later than planned after having to be rerouted through Coos Bay to avoid both 299 and 199 after driving our 8,300 pounds of playground across the country from Pennsylvania. It turns out that a large playground takes up a large truck -- it was the only thing in the truck:

The truck wasn't exactly packed to the rafters, but all those poles and bars and railings take up a lot of space and don't exactly play well with others in terms of being stacked neatly in a pile. We had been scrambling the day before to change our plans for unloading the truck. Many volunteers, a forklift, and a pallet jack were needed, and the plans for getting them to the truck all had to be changed. Luckily, once again, the community came through with everything we needed to move forward on this project.

Employees from Redwood State and National Parks came out in force, along with VISTA and AmeriCorps members, students and staff from Sunset High School and the Bar-O Boys Ranch, and other community members unloaded everything that could be unloaded by hand. A staff member from the Del Norte Community Health Clinic supervised the receiving paperwork and made sure we had every piece and box we need to put it together.

Thursday's forklift was going to come from Crescent Ace Hardware, who have been fantastic partners in this project from the start, but they needed it on Friday. Beyond Waste Salvage, on very little notice, came through with a replacement and unloaded the pallets. (Note the message on the box: The World Needs Play. How true.)

Some cast members from this spring's Lighthouse Rep production hammed it up as they did some heavy lifting. It was heavy, but not THAT heavy.

Eventually, the truck was empty and three rooms of the former PCC building were full:

Then it was time for snacks and group pictures. Our heroic students didn't want to be memorialized for their work, but we captured our parks folks for posterity:

Many thanks to everyone who helped unload our playground. We're now in the process of planning the installation. Within the next two or three months, the empty space in the community garden at the Wellness Center will become this:

The colors in this photo are not the same colors of our playground, but the equipment is all the right stuff in the right place. We have a lot of purple and green in our scheme. Stay tuned for updates about when the installation and grand opening will take place.

New Feature On School Menus

Here at Growing Tables, we're all involved in the Building Healthy Communities work in our community. Part of the work is building resident power and bringing people together who have similar interests and passions to create community change. Sometimes, people get discouraged in working toward change because change can be hard. It can be uncomfortable and people in power can feel threatened and close themselves off to new possibilities.

But sometimes, everything works. Here's an example:

Several weeks ago, my husband was frustrated when looking at the monthly menu of school lunches. We eat a mostly vegetarian diet, with a little fish thrown in occasionally, and there were some school meals that were ambiguous: is a piazza pizza vegetarian or does it have sausage or pepperoni on it? Are the beans in the bean and cheese burrito vegetarian or are they made with lard?

Our kindergartener desperately wanted to check off hot lunch on her sign-in sheet some mornings, but all we could safely allow was the mac-and-cheese once a month. So my husband searched the school district's website and sent off an email asking for more information and ended up having a fairly lengthy and positive exchange with Judy Wangerin, the head of food services at the district. She agreed to try to find some solutions.

And she and her team did! This month's menu includes a single box explaining a new feature of the school menus: meatless meals are marked with an asterisk.


Note the message in the first Monday of the lunch menu!

This is community change at its easiest and best. One resident saw a problem that affected something he really cared about: his (our) daughter's lunches. He figured out who had the power to fix the problem, communicated with them and explained the problem, and the problem was fixed, the system was changed.

Now this particular system change might not affect very many people, but the lesson does:

If you see something in our community that you feel should be changed, say something! Figure out who can make that change happen and talk to them. Let them know you think a change is needed. If nobody speaks up, nothing will change. Be a part of the solution!