In February 2009 a few of us helped write a grant application for money earmarked by the City of Toronto for community green space/gardening. We got the grant but the conflicts within the group and between the group and the TCHC manager prevented us from doing the work as we were supposed to by mid-November. One major problem was that the contractor given the job by TCHC had planned the work without much consultation with us, with more attention to the cosmetics and less to the functionality.
For example, they were planning on pouring concrete 4-foot wide walkways which would mean loosing precious land to environmentally-unfriendly paved paths. Yes, we wanted to have a wheelchair/walker accessible garden, but not all the plots needed to have wide pathways around them, and certainly concrete was not what we had thought about. Oh, and they wanted to build a gazebo, but there would be no pipes for watering the garden! That was a total deal-breaker.
The group imploded over this and other conflicts. Now we’ve been contacted by a TCHC community development worker who’s going to facilitate a meeting with the contractor next week. Apparently, this time we are to be consulted directly and our priorities determine the plan.
We had a meeting of sort, led by King R I, the garden’s current strong man, about 4 weeks ago to discuss renovations and other issues. As usual, it was mostly the King decreeing, occasionally interrupted by me jumping in and taking the floor to put in other ideas. These garden meetings are the most frustrating meetings I’ve been to.
Oh, and the King has ordered three of the women gardeners to dismantle and remove the frameworks they’ve built for supporting squashes saying they’re ugly and if they’re not removed the women can’t continue gardening and, worse, we risk loosing the garden to the City taking it for a parking lot! He’s also taken out a bench I had put near my plot which I and other neighbouring gardeners used. All part of beautification process, he says. Of course none of this has been discussed with others. No consultation process, no collective decision making. The King rules.