{"id":31131,"date":"2016-09-26T08:33:25","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T08:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test10.co.za\/C\/?p=31131"},"modified":"2017-10-10T13:26:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-10T13:26:24","slug":"gangsta-gardening-with-ron-finley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test10.co.za\/C\/gangsta-gardening-with-ron-finley\/","title":{"rendered":"Gangsta Gardening With Ron Finley"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s quite a challenge to sum Ron Finley up, he\u2019s a fitness trainer and a designer, but all with the purpose of supporting his passion \u2013 gardening. He calls what he does “gangsta gardening” and is slowly turning South Central in Los Angeles, a relatively low-income neighbourhood, into a food garden mecca.<\/p>\n

It started when he looked at his neighbourhood and realised that there was a complete lack of fresh and healthy food. Fed up, he took to the kerb and developed a piece of land outside his house, a lot owned by the city, into a thriving vegetable garden. LA authorities were not happy about this and cited him for gardening without a permit, which subsequently turned into a warrant.<\/p>\n

Not one to back down, he banded together with like-minded citizens and managed to overturn the citation. With a victory on his hands, he looked to what he could do with the rest of the vacant lots around Los Angeles. Notably, Los Angeles has roughly 26 miles (about 40 km) of unused parks, which equates to the same area as 20 Central Parks. 20 Central Parks all being completely unused. So Ron, along with his foundation, The Ron Finley Project, are staging a revolution. A horticultural revolution, to give the people of South Central Los Angeles their health back. And he\u2019s doing it one tomato at a time.<\/p>\n

Could you start by explaining what a gangsta gardener is? It\u2019s possibly the best term we\u2019ve ever heard.
\n<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Basically, a gangsta gardener it\u2019s someone that is there to buck the system and to make it work for them, rather than making it work for other people in the sense that most things now force us to conform in some kind of way. I came up with the term also because of what people consider gangster\u2026 rappers, selling drugs, gangs and misogynistic behaviour. No! We have to stop glorifying those things. Let\u2019s make gardening gangsta! The soil, the water, the earth and the heart, that\u2019s gangsta! Mother nature is the most prolific gangsta there is!<\/p>\n

What is your definition of a food desert? How does it relate to a big bustling city?<\/h4>\n

Well, I don\u2019t like to call them food deserts. I call them food prisons because you can find and grow stuff in a desert, in a prison you can\u2019t. The fact that you have no healthy, nutritious food in these areas is by design. You have to break out to get anything that’s decent. These are places where there is no healthy, nutritious, life-sustaining food. But it\u2019s not just the food. It\u2019s the environment. A lot of them are poisonous.
\n\"Ron<\/p>\n

How did you venture from fashion into urban gardening \u2013 what motivated you to make the shift?<\/h4>\n

To me, there is not that big a shift from fashion to gardening because it is all still art. You still are dealing with colours, textures, materials. It\u2019s just another kind of material, so I treat gardening just like what it is \u2013 art. It is fashion.<\/p>\n

One of the things that motivated me was the fact that there was no available healthy food where I was living. I would think about what I was going to eat. It would take hours to figure it out and then nine times out of ten, I would have to leave my area to find any kind of healthy food that was going to satisfy my palate.<\/p>\n

It was also about beautifying my space and creating the beauty I wanted to see, as well as making my life more convenient. I wanted to share this vision with people in the neighbourhood, people who pass by. I want people to see what could happen in these spaces if we redesigned them. We could make them more healthy, more happy and we would get to look at something beautiful every day.<\/p>\n

What was it like to turn your curbside dirt strip into a garden and then to see the effect that it had on the city\u2019s authorities?<\/h4>\n

For me, it was a labour of love. It was my meditation and passion. My release. My solace. It was the first thing that I would do in the morning and the last thing I would do at night.<\/p>\n

So for me it wasn\u2019t a labour. It was my calling \u2013 what I was supposed to be doing. I got instant gratification.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The comments that I would get from the people who walked by were so encouraging and inspired me to continue to do what I was doing. I saw that it was affecting my community. Plus, I got to feed myself. Gardening is sexy and like I have always told my sons, if you plant\u00a0flowers, you get flowers. So all kinds of flowers came to me. All shapes and sizes.<\/p>\n

As far as the city goes, basically what happened was that they got embarrassed \u00ad\u00ad\u2013 that is how I got the ordinance changed so that you can now plant food on the parkway. They saw what I was doing and totally agreed with it, so it wasn\u2019t that much of a big deal. Not like David and Goliath. It was more to right an injustice \u2013 if you aren\u2019t going to put any places where we can purchase healthy food in our \u2018hood’, don\u2019t stop us from growing our own healthy food! Eventually, we saw eye to eye.
\n\"Gangsta
\n\"Gangsta<\/p>\n

How many gardens have you built since you built the one in front of your house?<\/h4>\n

Who knows?! We don\u2019t keep track of that. We measure differently….<\/p>\n

What was the reaction to gangsta gardening from members of the community?<\/h4>\n

The first reaction was \u201cWhat the hell was I doing and why am I doing it?!\u201d Once they saw what I was doing, others were inspired to do it. At first, they were so curious. It wasn\u2019t the status quo and people are used to seeing things in a certain way and that is what they get comfortable with. I didn\u2019t see what I was doing as that inventive and different \u2013 people do this everywhere in other parts of the city.<\/p>\n

So, I didn\u2019t see it as being so different or such a big deal. What makes it a big deal, is how removed we are from our food and where it comes from. That is what made what I did something that people took notice of. Now people come from all around the world to see my garden. So it has had an amazing impact on my neighbourhood and on the planet at large.
\n\"Gangsta<\/p>\n

Is there a particular person\u2019s story where you\u2019ve seen a change in their health because of the increased healthy food they\u2019ve been eating?<\/h4>\n

Yes, the lady down the street who moved from the southern states. She lost 100 lbs (about 45 kg) from planting and eating out of her garden.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been known to say that growing your own food is akin to printing your own money. Can you elaborate on that for us?<\/h4>\n

Well, growing your own food is growing currency because firstly you have something that you can trade. You can trade food.<\/p>\n

Secondly, you have something that you can eat so you don\u2019t have to spend your money at the stores.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, you\u2019re going to be healthier so you don\u2019t have to spend your money on doctors and medication. It\u2019s preventative healthcare. It also helps your mental state because being outside with the plants and their vibrations raises your overall wellness and state of wellbeing. Money does grow on trees, don\u2019t believe the old adage.
\n\"Gangsta<\/p>\n

Do you think this is a model that we could use in South Africa where poverty is so high and violence is rife? Where would we begin?<\/h4>\n

You begin where everything begins. In the soil. That is how you change culture, through the soil. You have to have people understand their worth because people don\u2019t value themselves or their lives. We have the same problems in South Central as you do in South Africa. I call the situation ‘food apartheid’. We definitely don\u2019t have a shining example of race relations in this country, but the garden brings people together. That is how you build communities, through the garden. That’s what it does. Once you show people that life and opportunity come from the soil, you can change their lives. This is how we will regain our culture.<\/p>\n

Why do you think we\u2019ve become so far removed from our food \u2013 that it costs less to buy a meal from a fast food chain than it does to buy organic fruit?<\/h4>\n

Because we have been duped and bamboozled and we are depending on other sources to give us our food instead of doing it ourselves. We don\u2019t tend the land. Others do it for us and a lot of the food in our stores is sprayed with toxins and poisons. Food should heal you, not kill you. I think it\u2019s a matter of convenience for most people because it\u2019s quick and you just have to stand in line, but what they don\u2019t realize is that it is conveniently killing you. This is slavery.<\/p>\n

Gardening is about freedom, it is about breaking the chains and shackles that are placed upon our lives. Gardens represent independence from a system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What projects are you working on now?<\/h4>\n

Life. The betterment of it and I’m looking for co-conspirators to help me to change culture.
\n\"Gangsta<\/p>\n

What can we expect to see from The Ron Finley Project in the future?<\/h4>\n

You can expect more paradigm shifts, more culture changing, more beauty and showing people that they have the capacity to design and grow the life that they want to lead. I want everybody, especially children, to show the brilliance they have inside of them, and get gangsta with their shovel. We don\u2019t need to go looking for life on other planets. There is life here that we need to work on. It\u2019s not a matter of looking for the next best thing. Yes, things are messed up, but we can change it. That is part of our mission. To have people operate from happy \u2013 instead of from violence and ignorance<\/p>\n

Ready for more inspiration? Watch Ron’s TED Talk here.<\/p>\n