Stay Long Enough to Name Its Problems: Community Building Lessons From a Community Garden with Tracy Ore
Episode notes
Mentioned in this show:
PBS Doc on Grace Lee Boggs: https://www.pbs.org/video/pov-american-revolutionary-meet-grace-lee-boggs/
Grace Lee Boggs children's book: https://link.amazon/B01TZGEbm
Takeaways
- Real community change starts when you stay put. Tracy Ore's mentor challenged her to stay in one place long enough to name its problems with authority, and that challenge turned into a community garden that is still growing 20 years later.
- You do not need to know how to do something before you start. Tracy had never grown a vegetable before launching the St. Cloud State University Community Garden, and today it grows 95 varieties of tomatoes and is developing a brand-new one.
- Borrow companion planting for your community work. Instead of seeing other organizations as competition, ask what each partner brings to the table and how everyone's contributions can build on each other.
In Part 1 of this conversation on Ice Cream Social, host David Boyer welcomes Tracy Ore, a professor of sociology and the director of the community garden at St. Cloud State University. David opens by explaining why the show exists: community and ice cream, and the people in central Minnesota doing their own thing for the same reason he started Jupiter Moon. Tracy is, in his words, the right guest.
Tracy shares the origin story of the St. Cloud State Community Garden. In 2004, a mentor asked how she liked living in St. Cloud, and Tracy said she hated it and wanted to leave. That mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, told her you can't always just leave, and that you need to stay in one place long enough to name its problems with authority and then do something about it. A year later, in 2005, Tracy started a garden, even though she had never grown a garden or a vegetable in her life. Twenty years later, the garden grows 95 varieties of tomatoes, with a 96th on the way: the Husky tomato, a red and black striped variety being developed with a botanist and students. It has just completed its first field trial, and the sixth generation is already growing in the greenhouse.
The conversation then turns to what it takes to make a community better. Tracy came to this work as a community organizer and a sociologist who studies inequality, and after living in her neighborhood for more than 27 years, she says she understands the community well enough to add real context when someone says "this is what's going on." She borrows a gardening term to describe how she works with partners like Jupiter Moon: companion planting. David connects it to his own reason for opening an ice cream shop, and both land on the same word for what their spaces create: joy.
The episode closes with a look at Grace Lee Boggs, the Detroit activist and philosopher who shaped Tracy's life, the PBS documentary about her, and a children's book about Grace and her husband James Boggs that turns out to have a personal connection to Tracy. It is another in a summer of surprise connections. The conversation ran long, so David splits it into three parts, with Part 2 coming next week.