Kacie King checked honey
production at the North Philadelphia
farm, Greensgrow, which provides
fresh food where it is rare.
In one of my past lives I was a Saul Alinsky style community organizer. I organized a neighborhood coalition of Church and neighborhood groups on the north side of Philadelphia called Kensington. The community organization was called Kensington Action Neighborhood or simply KAN. The organization of working class people won some victories and gained some power in the few years I was the organizer building it. In this time it was a neighborhood in change from an industrial base, mostly mills, to something else. The neighborhood was one of row houses, 17 foot wide but three floors, one after another. The population at the time was mostly Catholic Irish, so there were many children in one block of row houses on both sides. Both my sons were very young at the time but they played together with children of all ages, mostly on the streets, as was the custom in this family-based neighborhood. The Kensington neighborhood had many problems and issues at the time but safety was not one of them. Parents, Grandparents, children all looked after each other and took care of each other. Often I felt like I was living in nineteen-century neighborhood, where families lived, worked, prayed and played together generation after generation. It was the neighborhood pictured in the first Rocky movie, which was being shot at the time we lived there. We went to see the movie at a theater near Kensington and Allegheny (K & A) where you could buy a fresh, large pretzel with mustard for ten cents.
I often wondered how this neighborhood was doing now, 33 years later. Now, instead of being a community organizer, I am into growing power home gardening and nonviolence. So you can understand my delight and joy when my friend Harvey Taylor sends me an article from the New York Times about urban farming in Kensington.
The article is called Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success. Naturally you can find it as one of the Featured Articles on the www.nonviolentworm.org. Reading this article I felt a real solidarity with this old neighborhood. The mills that provided food on the table might be gone, but now the working class people of the neighborhood can grow their own food. Like Growing Power, the small urban farm has grown into a major source of healthy food for many. This old guy now feels like the neighborhood, building within the urban environment gardens to Grow Renewable Affordable Food G.R.A.F.. Together we KAN Grow!
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