Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired April 13, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd36-13.html
When I go to Austin for the weekend, it's usually for admittedly selfish reasons: to catch a concert by bands that usually bypass Bryan/College Station, or to buy a new book or three from an independent store rather than a chain. But I recently spent a weekend in Austin for a nobler purpose, volunteering to build gardens with the Green Corn Project.
The Green Corn Project, or GCP, is an all-volunteer non-profit group with two missions. One is to provide Austin families with the means to grow their own organic food at home. The other is to educate Austinites about the benefits and techniques of organic home food gardening. GCP's unique approach lets it kill both birds with one stone: it recruits volunteers from the population at large, and then teaches them about gardening by putting them to work building one in someone else's back yard. The garden-building sessions, called Dig-Ins, happen on two weekends each year, once during the spring and again in fall.
Backyard food gardens help GCP's gardeners overcome the difficulties they face in finding enough for themselves and their families to eat. Like one out of seven Texans, many are "food insecure," meaning that they have an "uncertain or limited ability to secure nutritionally adequate food in socially acceptable ways." In fact, Texas has the second-highest rates of food insecurity in the nation. In Austin's Travis County, grocery money makes up 10 % of the total cost of basic needs, like shelter and medical care. However, that same amount of cash may be as much of half the income of a family at the federal poverty threshold. With family budgets spread that thin, something has to give. Too often, that something is food.
Agencies meant to fill that gap can't keep up with the demand. Only half the Texans eligible for food stamps in 2000 actually received them – making the state 45th out of 50 for food-stamp participation. Meanwhile, Austin-area food distribution agencies saw the number of requests for food assistance climb by 50 % in 2002, and by another 25 % in just the first 3 months of 2003.
That's where GCP comes in. It supplies its gardener partners with seeds, transplants, and compost, along with the volunteer labor necessary to turn those ingredients into a growing garden – setting them up with a free source of nutritious produce right in their own back yards. By growing organically, without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, GCP gardeners enhance both their own health and that of their neighborhood's soil and water.
More information about GCP is available at their web site, www.greencornproject.org. You can sign up for one of their educational gardening workshops, or even become a volunteer for the next Dig-In. But for Brazos Valley residents, the most valuable thing GCP offers is not a feel-good excuse for a trip to Austin. Rather, it's an inspiration, model, and resource for something we can do to build community, and ease hunger, literally in our own back yards.