New St. Cloud COP House garden provides produce in a food desert
A community garden at the COP House opened this summer to connect community members and address a local food desert.
The garden, which started around Memorial Day weekend and is closing up this week, hosted cabbage, tomatoes, various peppers and other produce. Interns at the St. Cloud Rotary Club Community Outpost took care of the garden over the summer, with Mondays used as a day for community members to come together and help.
“We wanted to make healthy foods accessible to this neighborhood and also to create a space where the community members can get together and socialize and give them an opportunity to talk about their health and healthy eating and such,” said CentraCare community health and wellness nurse at COP House Hani Jacobson.
For many residents in the area, the closest grocery store for produce is Coborn’s, which can be a far distance to walk for those without cars, said COP House officer Taylor Richmond. In food deserts, like south side St. Cloud, residents often lack easy access to healthy, affordable foods, said CentraCare supervisor of cultural competency and health equity Mahado Ali.
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Ali brought up the idea of a community garden after a discussion with Sergeant Ryan Sayre on unused space outside the COP House.
“I thought maybe this would be an opportunity to breach the food desert issue that exists in that area. There’s the food insecurities within a lot of the families that we serve and I know that a lot of the families that live in that area came from countries where they made their own gardens and made their own fruits and vegetables,” Ali said.
Gardening can also provide immigrants with a connection to their life before they immigrated, said Central Minnesota Sustainability Project garden manager Rick Walter.
Other community gardens exist in St. Cloud through the Central Minnesota Sustainability Project or CMSP, including Main Prairie Community Garden, James Kelly Community Garden and Promise Neighborhood Community Garden, which CMSP helped establish. Arrive Ministries also has a community garden and assisted the COP House garden.
“It doesn’t matter what your circumstances are. When you’re in the garden, you’re all involved in growing food. It breaks down barriers,” Walter said.
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Many residents in the area live in apartments where they lack access to space to garden. Richmond would like to get more community members to think of the garden as their own.
Ministry volunteers, neighborhood residents and kids helped in the garden over the summer.
“It was a good way to teach the kids, everything comes from something. So, it was a fun way to interact with the kids on a basis that they could understand it and be fun,” said former COP House intern Nick Hainlin.
Other programming at COP House provides food to the community, as well as other organizations in St. Cloud, such as the Yes Network. Jacobson also provides monthly classes through CentraCare on community wellness and the garden is expected to open again next year.
