Baltimore Community FellowshipsApplication Guidelines | Fellows | Fellows Profiles
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
As a freelance editor of academic books and journals, Miriam Avins, 42, used to spend her days fixing professors' prose. But since moving to Baltimore's Better Waverly neighborhood in 2003, she spends many hours tending tomato, okra and cabbage plants. Avins's path to community gardening is actually the story of an activist in the making, and she is using her fellowship to start a land trust to preserve community gardens and other green spaces.
When Avins and her family moved to Baltimore, a burned-out shell of a house was next door to their new home. She pushed the city to raze it, and then she and her neighbors cleaned up the vacant lot left behind. She envisioned a community garden that would bring neighbors together.
With help from an enormous rototiller and many hands, the first garden - Swiss chard, zucchini, tomatoes - was planted in April 2004 and dubbed Homestead Harvest. But like many community gardens, its fate wasn't secure. When the long-absent property owner agreed to sell to a developer, Avins saw that Baltimore needed a land trust that would own community-managed open lands. Thus, the seed was planted for Baltimore Green Space: A Land Trust for Community-Managed Open Space.
Since the start of her fellowship, Avins has spent considerable time raising awareness of the value of community gardening among city officials from the mayor's office and the departments of public works, planning and housing and community development. It's paying off. Baltimore Green Space has a contract for the first garden it's buying from the city -- two lots in Upper Fells Point are part of a 20-year-old, prize-winning community garden. In addition, the city planning department won a grant that will allow Avins to lead a working group examining issues about transferring property to a land trust. During the year-long project, the group will look at the characteristics of sites the city would like to see transferred to a land trust and evaluate city policies and laws that pose obstacles.
Avins believes: "Preserving community-managed open spaces is a win for everybody. These oases improve Baltimore's ecosystem and create places for people to socialize. And when city residents have gone to the trouble to turn a vacant lot into a place of beauty and community-building, they have equity in the property that should be recognized and protected."
