Get Fresh: How a Community Garden is Feeding the Hungry

by Dale Shoemaker

June 26, 2015

On Oakland Avenue in Pittsburgh, something stands out among the tightly-packed, run-down houses—a garden.

The garden, near the heart of the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, is more than just greenery. Here, a group of students in a club called Plant to Plate grow fruits and vegetables and donate what they grow to the Oakland Community Food Pantry that’s about a mile away. For the food pantry, this represents a shift in the way it operates. In Pittsburgh and across the country, putting fresh food on food pantry shelves is a growing trend, and one the students with Plant to Plate are happy to be a part of.

“It’s a good cause. We’re giving away food to people who don’t have it,” Sarah Kenney, a Pitt student and the current president of Plant to Plate, says. “And it feels really good to be outside, and I love plants because I’m a huge nerd. It’s literally just all good things here. Nothing is bad.”

Back in the spring of 2007, a different group of students and University of Pittsburgh environmental lecturer Ward Allebach started the garden as a class project. The students wanted to bring “wilderness” to the city, Allebach says, so they asked the university if they could make the vacant lot on Oakland Avenue into a park. The university was open to the idea, but wouldn’t allow the students to put in any permanent structures—meaning no benches cemented into the ground, and no trees.

So the students said, “‘Well, how about a garden?’” Allebach says.

The students knew they wanted to donate any food they grew in the garden, and after they broke ground, they asked the university if they could give their fruits and vegetables to the dining halls on campus. The university couldn’t make that work though.

“They couldn’t take [the] produce because it wasn’t being produced in a sufficient volume,” Allebach says. “They’ve got to have a reliable source of produce, so they couldn’t take just a few tomatoes here, a few beets here and a few carrots there. They needed a lot of them.”

That’s how the students ended up donating their produce to the food pantry, which didn’t need as large of a supply. Trevor Smith, the director of the pantry, says what the club’s donations lack in weight, they make up for in flavor.

“They’re not providing a huge quantity, they have a pretty small place to work with,” says Trevor Smith, the director of Oakland Community Food Pantry. “But they are providing a really high-quality food, one that’s different and unique, which we wouldn’t see otherwise.” 

Plant to Plate's garden on Oakland Avenue in Pittsburgh. Photo: Lou Blouin

Smith says most of their staple foods like potatoes and onions come from the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. Plant to Plate, though, adds variety.

“We don’t see a lot of red russian kale. We don’t see any from the food bank. We don’t see okra from the food bank, we don’t see beets, real strawberries. We get that stuff from Plant to Plate and a lot of our customers are unfamiliar with those things,” Smith says.

Allebach says the garden is a model of what a city can do with its vacant lots.

“When you’ve got people working in the garden trying to make it pretty and productive and getting their hands dirty, you’re not going to have people dealing drugs across the street,” he says. “It’s just not going to happen.”

This idea of filling food pantries with fresh rather than boxed food is still a new concept. Peter Clarke and Susan Evans, two professors from the University of Southern California, first called for food banks and food pantries to give out more produce than packaged goods in a 2011 article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In Pittsburgh, there are other partnerships like this where community gardens donate produce to the local food pantries. The Amity Harvest Community Garden in Pittsburgh’s Homestead neighborhood, for example, has discussed partnering with Rainbow Kitchen Community Services, Sharon Ford, the leader of the garden, says. 

Allebach says even though they started the garden to make the city greener, it’s now more than that. As Karley Storm, a gardener with Plant to Plate says, they also have a connection with people who live nearby.

“We just plant whatever we think the people at the food bank would like,” Storm says. “We donate to them, so we want to make sure we’re giving them food they like.”

For Trevor Smith of Oakland Community Food Pantry, working with local gardens—and local farms, in the future—will allow him to serve the freshest, healthiest food to the customers at the food pantry.

“This kind of partnership—we’re looking to build more and more of that.”