Great and grateful to have had the opportunity to design and facilitate a workshop with a wonderful bunch of committed professionals, the Jersey City Green Team, on a research and development (R&D) project for bringing an Urban Agriculture Program to Jersey City – Farms in the City.
Background
Jersey City planner, Tanya Marione-Stanton was thumbing through GOOD magazine when she saw the call for cities to take part in GOOD 2.0, (R&D) Initiative described as “an open workshop platform for improving your city.” Tanya entered Jersey City into the contest and the application was one of eight accepted out of 100s. You can read more about the background in The Jersey City Independent
Workshop Design
Over 60 (from 80+ RSVPs) people showed up at the elegant Culinary Conference Center, Hudson County Community College to participate in the world cafe style workshop on the topic of THRIVING FARMS IN THE CITY. We followed the classic appreciative inquiry story-telling format first to DISCOVER what strengths, gifts and capabilities already exist in the community in relation to our topic:
Question 1: Discover
What already exists in us, around us that we can build on to create thriving farms in the city?
We moved on to DREAM in order to tap into our imaginative capacities to envision what else in possible in urban agriculture in the neighborhoods of Jersey City:
Question 2: Dream
Imagine your biggest dream for your Farm in the City. In 2 years, what do you see, hear, taste, smell, touch, enjoy?
Next, we turned our serial conversations to DESIGN where we began to co-create how we best organize ourselves and include others to bring the dream into reality; we got tactical about the requirements and resources:
Question 3: Design
How do we make it happen? What are the organizing elements? Who do we work with and where and when?
From there the participants broke out into their 6 residential wards to look at huge maps of their streets and place icons of what already exists as designated green space and what can be turned into green space. This information will be [click to continue…]
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