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The Cabrini-Green projects are home to most of the group's young farmers. (Photo by William Van Roden) |
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| Farming comes to one of America's most notorious housing projects. by Nadia Oehlsen Two years ago, protracted gang warfare forced the Cabrini Greens to let a crop of harvest-ready vegetables rot in a garden next to their namesake Chicago public housing project. The gangs aren't as active this year, but thieves are always abundant. Even at a safer garden five miles away, members of Cabrini Greens, an agricultural and social club, have taken to guarding their land, and have witnessed police and gang members running through it, shooting at each other. But to 30 or so kids every year, a summer spent farming in the city seems worth the risks. "I learned how to milk goats over the phone," says Helen Marshvanks, one of six teenagers gathered at a two-acre Chicago lot to spend the night protecting their garden, goats, chickens, and ducks from thieves and vandals. Now, she says, it may be hard to go back to the store-bought processed foods she grew up on. Few city kids have raised vegetables, let alone farm animals; but these kids make a little cash doing both, thanks to Cabrini Greens and Heifer Project International (HPI), a Little Rock, Arkansas--based organization that has long provided farm animals and training in animal husbandry to rural communities in poor countries. HPI chose Chicago for its first U.S. urban project partly because the city has fewer zoning restrictions on farm animals than others do. HPI is giving groups in Chicago and Milwaukee goats, rabbits, fowl, and cows, and helping them start indoor fish and worm farms. "We're using the same community development model HPI uses around the world," says Alison Meares, an HPI Chicago field representative. According to the model, communities that receive animals -- be they alpacas in Bolivia or goats in Chicago -- are expected to give their animals' first offspring back to HPI so they can be donated to other communities. "In developing countries, families come to rely on the agricultural enterprises as their main sources of income," Meares says. "We're not sure that's going to be the outcome in Chicago, that someone's going to be able to rely on an agricultural product for their income, but our goal is to develop micro-enterprises that can bring some income and provide all kinds of skills that can translate into other job situations." The gardens Cabrini Greens cultivates provide only a fraction of the group's operating budget (the rest comes from grants), but teaching kids who live in treeless, violence-plagued housing projects to nurture plants and animals has its own rewards, according to Dan Underwood, who became a Cabrini Greens volunteer when his children joined the group in 1992 and is now its executive director. Between harvest and planting times, Underwood, a longtime civil rights activist and former Cabrini-Green resident, coaches a drum corps, drill team, and color guard at Friedrick Von Schiller School, a middle school near the housing project, from which he recruits most of his young farmers. "There are so many lessons to gain from it: how to work, how to run a business, and how to learn something about the Earth," Underwood says. And caring for animals can be highly therapeutic for kids, Meares says, particularly those living in difficult circumstances. "You learn how to take care of things other than yourself," says Marshvanks, who is considering studying nursing or computer programming when she graduates from high school in two years. This summer, she was the primary caretaker of a goat named Sparkle and Sparkle's kid Windy. "They go wherever we go, to different gardens. They're just like babies. I never knew a goat could act so much like a human being. When we're on the expressway and Windy sees trucks, he tries to hide up under my arm." Omar, 15, one of five of Underwood's children to have joined the group, oversees the ducks, which he admits he won't be too sentimental about selling as food. "It's just about time to cut a couple of them's necks off," he says. "No problem." Along with his stoic farm demeanor, Omar has a sense for agribusiness, driving himself and his coworkers to increase efficiency and production, Underwood says. A core group of Cabrini Greens recently spent a week at HPI's training center in rural Arkansas learning how to make goat cheese and other goat-milk products. The group hopes to raise the $8,000 needed to buy a pasteurizing machine by later this year and to begin selling cheese to the upscale Chicago stores and restaurants that already buy their produce, such as the local Whole Foods Market and the eateries Charlie Trotter's and Michael Jordan's. Meanwhile, HPI is preparing to deliver two bull calves to Cabrini Greens. They'll be castrated and trained to help the group plow its gardens. "We didn't want to buy more machinery," Underwood says. "It was always breaking down, and we were always searching for cow manure anyway." Building suitable shelter for these larger animals will be easy compared to finding land on which to build it. "Most of the communities we work with don't own any land at all, so they've got to work out other arrangements," Meares says. "The Cabrini Greens have really built up the soil, but they don't own a single acre of all the garden spaces they're using. That's a little precarious. So far, they've been pretty lucky." Several Cabrini-Green residents are battling in court and in the media against plans by HUD and the Chicago Housing Authority to gradually demolish the infamously dangerous and expensive-to-maintain housing project in the next 15 to 20 years, which could pose a serious threat to Underwood's program. But both Underwood and Meares say they're confident many of the project's buildings will be secure for at least another decade. Still, Meares is both hopeful and worried about the prospects for groups like Cabrini Greens. She points to a new Chicago organization called Neighborspace, which buys delinquent lots for a dollar from the city, then holds the title to the land. "Your agreement with Neighborspace is that you'll always keep the land for greening, and they'll pay the taxes on it every year," Meares says. "But there are a lot of political hurdles to jump over, and most aldermen would rather see the lots turned into condos." |
Keywords:
Cabrini Greens, Cabrini Green, Heifer Project, International, Dan Underwood
