Cleaning out my folder I found a stack of old drawings from the men. Check out the happy bumble bee!
Month: January 2012
SEEDFOLKS continued
The second crew finished SEEDFOLKS yesterday. Even though I have read this book and listened to the men read it for years one passage was new to me this time….
It turns out my greatest gift as a teacher is what I learn from the men. Before class there was a little delay and the men were late and grumpy and trying to engage in nonproductive ways. One guy, though, gently brought the whole class back by saying to another man, “OK we understand now, let’s read the book.” We all kind of looked at him and thought “now there’s an option.” I thanked him and pointed out what a great skill he had for leading the group out of a dead end and heading us back towards our goal. It made a great difference, suddenly we were all peaceful, relaxed and ready to read. Then he read this passage and the circle was complete.
“But the garden’s greatest benefit, I feel, was not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes see our neighbors.”
VENTURING OUT, Inc.
Today I had a fantastic meeting with Laura Winig of Venturing Out, Inc. She runs a great prison entrepreneurial program here in Boston. It is similar to our Maintenance Collaborative in that it meets once a week for 3 months. Her program is neat because it teaches inmates how to become entrepreneurs. Volunteers meet with the students for 12 weeks and help them with a business plan for whatever business the person is interested in pursuing upon release. Laura and I discussed our programs and how I am trying to get a Master Gardener accreditation for the Maintenance Collaborative. We decided to look into doing a collaborative garden entrepreneur program. Will keep you posted!
SEEDFOLKS
This week in class we read aloud the book SEEDFOLKS by David Fleischman. I had both crews so there were 16 men for 6 books. Woops. Need to buy more books. They took turns reading and sharing. Many of them declined to read, others read more than once. SEEDFOLKS is a “read aloud in 2 hours” kind of book. The book is fiction and has 13 chapters written through the eyes of 13 different people, young, old, male, female, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, Jewish … who all stumble upon an abandoned lot in Cleveland and turn it into a thriving community garden. I chose it for class because it is easy to read and easily understood. The characters are witty, honest, earnest and real. They discuss racist feelings, teen pregnancy, drugs, violence, sadness, loneliness, prejudices, and most of all the joys and healing of gardening.
The prison garden is considered a community garden so we are able to get seeds and compost from the City of Boston each spring via the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN). Right about now we order several truck loads of compost to be delivered in April. We get all kinds of seeds too and the BNAN always throws in some seeds we did not ask for. One year it was gorgeous orange marigolds.
SEEDFOLKS is a great read this time of year. It provides hope of spring, glimpses of green images and the assurance of the goodness of community gardening.
Winter Propagation
I dug up 3 big clumps of my prized Primula, more lovingly called cowslips. Gertrude Jekyll taught me that to propagate Primula is easy. I brought in this big bucket of Primula to illustrate to the men, hands on, how to gently tease apart the tender roots and pot them up for winter.
The divided plants will spend the freezing months in the cold frames but emerge ready to pop into the ground come spring.
We divided these last year in class and then planted them at the prison garden.
PS
Did you know that Primula are evergreens? You can really see that now that it is December.
I then had the men draw what they had done. A fantastic way to understand a plant is to divide and draw.
Moss Conservation
One of our readers recommended this article. What a great program!
Creative Ideas for a Greener Future
Prison inmates help researchers cultivate threatened mosses
By Adelheid Fischer
July-September 2005 (Vol. 6, No. 3)
When the early woodland people of North America needed diaper material, they stripped mosses from trees, rocks, and downed limbs. Packing the plants snugly around their infants, they created a cushioned layer that could absorb ten times its weight in liquid.
The ability of mosses to sponge up moisture has not been lost on modern industry, particularly the horticultural trade. Mosses find their way into shipping material for drought-sensitive bulbs and plants. And with a little watering, they add long-lasting green accents to decorative floral wreaths, planters, and hanging baskets.
Indeed, so widespread is the commercial use of wild-collected mosses that some U.S. forests are undergoing the botanical equivalent of strip mining. According to results from a study released in 2004, the U.S. floral industry alone consumes up to 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year—for both domestic purposes and export. Patricia Muir, the study’s author and a professor of botany and plant pathology at Oregon State University in Corvallis, calculates that this amount is enough to fill some 2,400 semi trucks, most of it coming from the Pacific Northwest and the Appalachian Mountains. Although she cautions that these figures are ball-park estimates—few accurate records on permitted moss collecting are kept, and illegal harvesting is rampant—Muir speculates that the commercial value of mosses can add up to US$165 million annually.
If Nalini Nadkarni had her way, this wholesale collecting would cease. Nadkarni, a forest ecologist at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, would like to see moss farming replace collecting as the main source of moss for the horticultural trade. And she has found an unusual base of operations for her experiments to develop moss cultivation techniques—a minimum security prison.
Nadkarni has joined a growing chorus of botanists who warn that the overcollecting of mosses is doing serious harm to forest ecosystems. Anecdotal reports by scientists and land managers in the Pacific Northwest describe whole swaths of forest that have been stripped of mosses, particularly those that lie within easy reach of roads. The small body of published research on mosses suggests that these plants may play a vital role in forest ecosystems by capturing nutrients and regulating humidity and water flow. Moss mats also provide nesting habitat for the threatened marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) and are home to some 300 species of animals, primarily minuscule inhabitants such as mites, springtails, rotifers, and water bears.
Once removed, most mosses are slow to recolonize their former sites. Recent studies by Robin Wall Kimmerer at the State University of New York, Syracuse, show that some species recover at a painstaking rate of only one percent each year. Decades, if not more than a century, may pass before they regain their former plushness.
“It really is time that we start learning how to farm [mosses] just like we do corn and tobacco and everything else,” charges Nadkarni in a recent New York Times interview. To help realize this goal, in 2004 Nadkarni secured grants from the National Science Foundation and the Conservation Trust of the National Geographic Society.
Then she and students from the Forest Canopy Lab at The Evergreen State College teamed up with master gardener Raymond Price. A volunteer at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison near Littlerock, Washington, Price had already organized a successful project to grow organic vegetables at the prison. In November 2004, with help from graduate student Adrian Wolf, he and several inmates turned a semi-enclosed shed on prison grounds into a moss laboratory.
For their experiment, Nadkarni obtained permits to collect four species of moss from nearby Olympic National Forest. They divided the wild-gathered plants into clumps and set them on perforated plastic trays. Project organizers trained inmates to carry out the logistics of the experiment, from rotating the trays and keeping notes on environmental conditions to watering the plants with throughfall rainwater collected from the forest.
Mosses are ideal plants for growing in a prison environment. They are hardy, take up little space and require no sharp implements for cultivation. And horticulture projects are an easier sell to prison administrators than are other kinds of programs because growing plants has been shown to have multiple benefits for incarcerated people — from offering therapeutic value to fostering development of post-prison job skills.
But raising mosses has proven far more tricky than growing corn. Despite the fact that mosses possess one of the most ancient lineages on Earth, little is known about methods for cultivating them. To date, the Cedar Creek mosses have survived captivity, but their slow growth rates limit their promise for commercial production. Future experiments call for stimulating faster growth with measured doses of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Farmed mosses that respond well to such inputs could be test-marketed through nurseries. If market responses are favorable, the prison’s greenhouses may one day reduce collecting pressures on wild mosses while providing inmates with marketable skills for life outside prison walls.
In the meantime, Price points to one proven measure of the project’s success. To date, he says, nearly two dozen inmates have cycled through the program before being released. “I still meet graduates on the streets of Olympia who come up to me and tell me how great the program is,” Price says.
About the Author
Adelheid Fischer is a freelance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona.
Man with a Mission
One of the students found this mud encrusted action figure in the garden in August. Kind of looked like the guy who found him too, strong, pumped up, doing his job with a smile on his face. Hopefully, my student will fare as well as this action hero, get lost for a while and resurface to the delight of others.
Composting and Awesome Spider Mouse
Yesterday in class I taught the men all about composting. We started with hands on material although they opted out and let me do all the “hands on”! I brought our kitchen compost bucket as well as 3 bags filled with various stages of decomposing compost. I did not make them touch but I did make them smell just to prove to them that composting done right does not only NOT smell bad but actually smells good, like the earth, fresh in a wholesome natural way.
I then asked the men to read aloud from several articles about composting from Organic Gardening Magazine; composting science, composting entrepreneurs, composting benefits…. we then discussed all the micro and macro organisms in compost and how compost is like a really good party inside the bin. Talking about all these worms and bugs suddenly prompted a question from one of the men, a teacher’s dream come true.
You know how when you have a dream you don’t remember it sometimes until something ignites your memory the next day? Well, suddenly in the midst of all this discussion one of the students asks “Is there such a thing as a Spider Mouse?” Well I don’t know much about dreams, spiders or mice so I asked him “How did Spider Mouse make you feel?” I thought he would say scared or lonely or creepy, but he said with a big grin, “Awesome!” He said it was a “cool” dream.
So there you have it. Not only did they learn composting but we were able to tap into someone’s dream and glimpse an “awesome” feeling.
Compost is good. Awesome is good. Spider Mouse does exist.
Ferriss the Teacher
For those of you new to the Emerald Necklace Conservancy’s Maintenance Collaborative blog I want to introduce myself. My name is Ferriss Buck Donham and I teach Horticulture to 8 minimum security inmates every Wednesday at the Boston Pre Release Center (BPRC) in Roslindale, MA.
All other weekdays throughout the year the men work in the Emerald Necklace Parks in Boston and Brookline. The idea for the program began in the 1980s when then Governor Michael Dukakis saw the need for jobs for inmates or soon to be released men. Dukakis also witnessed the condition of the parks and recognized a need for maintenance to make them safer and more pleasant as well as preserving a piece of American History. The Emerald Necklace Conservancy started the collaborative about 8 years ago.
At the BPRC we have a classroom and we have gardens on site. We have vegetable, herb, perennial, bulb, cutting and fruit gardens. The goal is to teach job skills to men who are about to leave the prison for good. I am a Master Gardener as well as own my own residential gardening business where I design, install and maintain perennial gardens. I teach the men using the Master Gardener Curriculum that I have altered to fit the needs of the program as well as many of the business skills I have acquired over the years owning my own business.
While in the parks the men acquire many job skills, from showing up to work on time and managing themselves with others, laboring in all weather conditions, learning maintenance of plants in an historic park and commitment to a job that makes a difference to the many people who safely use the parks every day in all kinds of weather.
In the classroom we learn about soil, seed to fruit production, compost, organic practices, propagation, pruning and pests. We spend time reading aloud, writing and drawing, coloring and painting. The classroom time is very hands on and structured in an inclusive way to create learning in an experiential and inviting way.
Welcome to the blog and I look forward to sharing the program with you.
In the meantime, I am constantly on the lookout for similar programs and inspiration.
Here is today’s inspiration:
Inspiration and motivation
Ray sent me this article today. Enjoy some inspiration and motivation on this January day.
Mr. G Works to Help Ex-Offenders Succeed
By Sarah McNaughton on Jan 9th, 2012
Getting Out and Staying Out founder Mark Goldsmith works late into the night in his East Harlem office, planning a seminar for young ex-offenders. (Photo by Sarah McNaughton.)On a rainy Wednesday night, six young ex-convicts sit in the basement of an East Harlem storefront, eating slices of pepperoni and sausage pizza. Except for the sounds of chewing, the room is silent, the young men shifting in their chairs and avoiding eye contact until Mark Goldsmith walks in, takes a seat beneath a poster of Muhammed Ali and begins his seminar: “How to be Successful in School and Work.”
Goldsmith, known here as Mr. G., introduces a hypothetical situation: “There’s a hot party in Brooklyn tonight, best-looking women in town, you’re on the guest list. I’ll pick you up outside Yankee stadium at 10:30,” Goldsmith says. The guys who have heard this one before smile; the ones who haven’t look at the floor.
“Now, you know what I have in my car. I don’t go anywhere without a weapon. Never. I don’t go anywhere without some drugs that I can sell,” he says. The guys chuckle. “But this is the hottest party of the year and you’re on the guest list. So are you coming with me or what?”
“Hell yeah,” says the youngest man.
Goldsmith groans. “You don’t want to miss the party, but you ain’t going in my car,” he says. “What happens if we go one block and I got a blinking light and the cop pulls us over? Guess what, we’re going to Rikers.”
Goldsmith later says he’s sick of hearing people complain about being unlucky or tricked into bad situations. “The idea that they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time is getting tiresome,” he says. “It’s bullshit.”
A retired cosmetics executive, Goldsmith, who is 75, spends most of his time with ex-convicts. After 35 years in business, he switched to working with and for people with whom he ostensibly has little in common: poor young men with damaged families, criminal records and no plans for the future.
Six years ago he founded Getting Out and Staying Out, a non-profit program working to keep New York City’s young men out of prison for good. Recidivism rates — the proportion of people who return to prison within three years of their release – hovers above 60 percent nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. In New York City, reports the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, the rate is about half that. Recidivism for men enrolled in what’s informally called GOSO, Goldsmith says, stays in the range of 15 to 17 percent.
Sitting in his East Harlem office across the street from a dollar store, Goldsmith still looks dressed for Wall Street: pressed navy slacks and jacket, crisp collared shirt, red silk tie. He’s a community advocate trapped in a marketing executive’s wardrobe. When he’s in his element—speaking to ex-cons from Rikers Island about succeeding in school and work—he curses like a D-list celebrity. He’s not shy about saying he believes drugs should be legalized. “I deal with reality,” he often says.
His involvement began in 2002 when Goldsmith, already retired, agreed to participate in a Principal for a Day program organized by the non-profit group Public Education Needs Civic Involvement in Learning, or PENCIL.
Always looking for a challenge, Goldsmith asked to be assigned to a struggling school. “I was a bit of a wise guy,” he admits. “I thought I was going to get East New York or South Bronx, but I ended up getting Rikers Island. So off to Rikers Island I went,” he goes on, “and I had a terrific day.”
Goldsmith requested a return to Rikers the next year, then founded GOSO in 2004, using a Starbucks at 39th and Madison as his office for almost two years before moving to this storefront on 116th Street in East Harlem.
His wife, Arlene, founded and directs New Alternatives for Children, which supports medically fragile children and their families, so Goldsmith knew what a non-profit needed. Development was slow and he wasn’t used to limited funding, but he was determined to make GOSO a success because he saw a little of himself in the Rikers inmates.
“When I was 18, 19 and 20, I didn’t have a clue,” he recalls. “All my friends were finishing four-year schools and going off to professional schools” while he dropped out of Penn State and joined the Navy for two years, then arrived in New York harbor and decided he’d found home. “I know what it’s like to be looked at as a truant or a troublemaker versus someone who is performing,” he says.
He finished his undergraduate work at New York University and earned an MBA from Baruch College before landing a job with Pfizer, the pharmaceutical firm.
He and Arlene, married for 50 years now, had twins—a boy and a girl—in 1967. She says Goldsmith was a great father, something that informs the way he runs GOSO now. “I think he’s translated that fatherhood experience into helping these young guys who’ve never had a father figure,” she says.
Goldsmith says many of the Rikers guys do look at him like a father, or grandfather. “When they leave this office at night, they’ll say, ‘Home safe, Mr. G,’ and they mean it,” he says. “They hope I don’t get shot, because where they’re going they could get shot.”
GOSO begins its work while inmates are still in Rikers or an upstate prison. Mentors visit or correspond with them frequently, encouraging them to focus on school and on developing a plan for when they’re released. Participants who excel at academics receive full scholarships to Ohio University’s College Program for the Incarcerated; for inmates who don’t receive a degree before they leave prison, the first goal is to obtain a GED, then find a job.
But while education and employment are important parts of the program, as in many others across the country, GOSO also helps participants with such basic life skills as building healthy relationships and managing stress. On the first day participants walk into the office, sometimes just hours after leaving Rikers, they sit down with a mentor and create a new resume, find housing and make appointments for psychological and health services.
GOSO works with men ages 16 to 24. They’re required to complete a full curriculum of seminars, including Goldsmith’s success seminar and others focusing on financial planning, interviewing skills, legal rights, self marketing and fatherhood. The successful businesspeople Goldsmith has recruited for the board of directors also serve as mentors and help participants find work.
Even after six years—during which the program moved to a real office, hired six employees, helped more than 3,000 inmates and raised an annual budget of about $1 million from grants, donations and prizes—Goldsmith still organizes nearly every aspect of GOSO. He even makes the “success bags” each participant receives on his first day: alarm clock, notebooks, pencils, condoms and a monthly Metro card.
Sara Hobel, executive director of the Horticultural Society of New York, hired four GOSO participants last year to join the society’s “Green Team” of 40, which builds and maintains gardens and plantings for non-profit organizations across the five boroughs.
“It was great,” she says of the experience. “In fact, two of the guys were some of our absolute best workers.” She’s looking forward to hiring more GOSO grads when the society’s projects pick up again in the spring.
The Horticultural Society has worked with Rikers inmates before on the island’s large garden, but Hobel says GOSO offers something unique. “The one thing about repeat offenders, and young offenders in particular, is that there is no one answer. There are so many layers when you look at why are you there, and how did you get to this place, and how are we going to get you out,” she says. Unlike “a lot of cookie-cutter, well-intentioned programs out there,” GOSO tries to customize its assistance to each incarcerated or released man.
The guys eating pizza in the basement are lucky and they know it. GOSO is an exclusive program that only enrolls several hundred inmates each year as compared to the usual thousands at other reentry programs. But GOSO is important, says JoAnne Page, president and CEO of the Fortune Society, one of the nation’s more prominent reentry programs, serving around 3,000 prisoners annually.
“While our programs have helped tens of thousands of men and women stay out of prison and find a new, crime-free path, there is still a pressing and growing need for more services,” Page says. “Getting Out and Staying Out is part of the non-profit community helping to fill this need.”
At Rikers, Goldsmith says, “a big question always comes up: Why am I doing this? They’re very suspect. Why aren’t I out driving a Rolls-Royce and playing golf?” he says. “They’re very concerned about why I am spending my time with them. Deep down they consider themselves worthless and stupid, which I know they are neither.”
But it’s still a tough road. In the GOSO basement, the guys are discussing their talents and where their strengths could take them professionally, listing interests in writing, math, athletics and computers. One participant who has been with GOSO for several years is training to become a paramedic; another is interested in songwriting.
When Goldsmith asks the group to think of three people in their lives who are supportive, most of them can hardly come up with one or two. Several look at Goldsmith shyly and say, “You.”
This isn’t a surprise. The family is often the main problem, Goldsmith says, and most of these young men have had multiple relatives serving prison terms.
“Going to jail is something they are aware of the day they become aware of society. Some of them fully expect from the get-go to end up there,” he says, frowning. “There’s a combination of ending up there and not living a long life, which means they aren’t future-oriented.”
One of the older and quieter guys at the seminar says this is only his second time at the office, but that he’s been a part of the program for his five years on Rikers. This was his first seminar, and he loved it.
“He’s cool as shit,” he says of Goldsmith. “I didn’t know he cursed that much. Makes him more down to earth.”
After the seminar, the men say goodbye and Goldsmith rushes to pack up and leave in time to get to a dinner party. As he flutters around the room, one man returns to tell Goldsmith he thinks he lost his Metro card.
“How much is it to get on the subway these days? I don’t even know,” Goldsmith says.
“Four-fifty for both ways,” the man replies.
“Four-fifty?” Goldsmith‘s eyes widen. He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a five.
“Thanks, Mr. G.,” the young man says, pocketing the bill as he walks out into the rain. “Home safe.”
Emerald Necklace Conservancy Maintenance Collaborative 