Baltimore Community Fellowships
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Baltimore, Maryland
2007
When Miriam Avins began her fellowship, much of her day was spent with her hands in dirt, tilling soil, planting Swiss chard, zucchini and tomatoes.
Today, she spends just as much time at a desk job at the city planning department.
But this freelance editor turned community gardener is continuing the work she began during her fellowship: She is making sure community-managed green spaces are protected from being sold, developed or reclaimed by negligent owners.
Avins got her start helping community gardeners figure out how a land trust could benefit them. Today, her nonprofit, Baltimore Green Space, is working with the city planning department to help it realize such a trust's benefits for the entire city.
"When city residents have gone to the trouble to turn a vacant lot into a place of beauty and community-building, they create enormous benefits for themselves, their neighborhoods, and the city as a whole-benefits that should be protected for the long term," says Avins. "That's where the land trust comes in. Baltimore Green Space's contract with the city's Office of Sustainability will determine how using the land trust would work from the city's point of view."
Without the help of OSI's Community Fellowship, Baltimore Green Space might not have gotten as far as it did, Avins says.
"Having the fellowship really gave me access to people in the city government and at other non-profits," Avins says. "And it gave my whole project a level of legitimacy that might have been harder to achieve otherwise."
The OSI-nurtured project came from a smaller idea Avins had simply to clean up one small space in her neighborhood.
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 unexpectedly 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.
As a result of Avins' fellowship, Baltimore Green Space purchased its first garden into the land trust: the Upper Fells Point Improvement Association Community Garden, which is an award-winning space among the city's oldest to be managed by neighborhood members.
Along the way, Avins said she learned that establishing partnerships was one of the key elements to a successful community project. "It takes a lot of people to accomplish something," she says.
She even served as a resource to other Fellows who are interested in greening projects.
Avins not only paired up with other "green" enthusiasts and city agencies, but she also has partnered with the Parks and People Foundation to survey all the community- managed open spaces in the city, cataloging them and looking at their characteristics.
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."
