Cornerstone grows faith and food

Tony Tarket, Quesada Gardens Initiative's horticulture expert, also known as the "Green Goatee," has been spending a good bit of time lately helping bring Bayview's newest community garden to life at Cornerstone Missionary Baptist Church on 3rd and Paul. A ribbon-cutting on Saturday was part of festivities that included food and gardening education along with a healthy dose of smiles.

Auria Styles, and five other women helped coordinate the project, and was the first to reach out to Quesada Gardens and get a tour of various community and backyard gardens residents have created in the heart of the neighborhood. She and Angelique Tompkins, who has been involved with the Latona Community Garden project, attended a SEFA meeting to make further inroads into the community of concern about our neighborhood's food and health issues.

Together with parishioners Brian Cody and Gina Warren, the group assessed the open space next to the church, as well as the interests and needs of the future gardeners, to design the best garden for Cornerstone. As a result, double-height raised beds and dwarf fruit tree containers, made from wood donated by Home Depot, with fresh soil and mulch from Greenwaste Management now form an eye-pleasing crescent and a place for raising healthy fruits and vegetables.

Congratulations to our friends at Cornerstone; and "thank you" Green Goatee helping create another in the network of community and backyard gardens that are transforming the heart of our beautiful neighborhood.

Bayview gardens get attention, Stanford-style

After eight years, it's an official tradition at Quesada Gardens. Stanford men and women roll out of beds on a Saturday morning, climb into cars, and end up with tools in hand, helping with the gardens and gathering spaces in the heart of Bayview.

There aren't many gardens in the network that haven't benefited from some Stanford-style love over the years. Today, the Bridgeview and Latona gardens got most of the attention, including a heroic effort to move and spread a mountain of mulch.

A few images from the day show the group after gardening and a grabbing a quick lunch, QGI'er Tom Galante with Danny and Chris, and local fashionistas Dillan, Ava, and Jacob.

Food Guardians dig in at Bridgeview

The air was cool, and the sky gray, but the spirit at the Bridgeview Community Teaching and Learning Garden was unmistakably warm when the Food Guardians and Bridgeview Garden project leaders Joel and Mary McClure met last Monday morning to begin planting. Food Guardians is the newest group to use the Bridgeview Garden to grow food and share knowledge about health, community and the environment.

The group's members are Bayview Hunters Point residents who are working hard to improve the neighborhood's food system ... and teach us all a thing or two along the way.

Here are a few images from the day:

Bayview babies saved by gardeners

Just in: a sweet report from Tony Tarket and Tom Galante who found, at the Quesada Gardens, three baby squirrels that had fallen from one of the palm trees. 

Each baby suffered a bloody nose from the fall. After being christened "Quesada," "Palou," and "Little BV," they were carefully transported to the San Francisco SPCA's animal rehab unit.

Another baby squirrel, "Latona," also fell from the tree, landing on some soft plants before running off to parts unknown.

Visions of La Moda students excel

A student fashion show on April 21st raised funds for Visions of La Moda Fashion Studio for Youth, a Bayview Hunters Point organization that provides youth ages 12-18 with a free introduction to the fashion industry. 

The funds will help with expenses for exceptional students to participate in the New York Collections - Fashion Week either in September or in February of 2012. Star students Chante Mobley and Arielle Piamonte modeled garments they designed and made.

Runway 2011: Enchantment, held at at the Galleria San Francisco Design Center, was a partnership production of the Fashion Networking Association and the Apparel Design and Merchandising program at San Francisco State University.

Traci Peace, Visions' founding director, reported how proud she was of Chante and Arielle who, she said, "had never sewn anything prior to starting the program this past summer."

Chante and Arielle are pictured wearing their own designs.

Creative businesses, local flavor

Scrappy artists have made work and lived in Bayview Hunters Point home for decades, enriching the neighborhood with every creation. So Peg Conley and Rika Kruze must feel right at home. They share the entrepreneurial bug, are talented artists, and have chosen Bayview Hunters Point as the place to live and work.

Peg lives on Palou, is active with Art 94124, and has been found in the Quesada Gardens with pad and watercolor brush in hand. Rika lives on Hudson, and regularly volunteers in the gardens while keeping an eye out for a good photo opportunity.

What they produce feeds their souls, and communicates personal stories about the place they live. Both are happy to share the results.

Peg Conley's transportational watercolor paintings and textual messages have found their ways to a set of cards for all occasions. The colorful, muted-here-bold-there images of nature she finds close to home and heart are lush and unmistakablely her own.

Rika Kruse moved to the neighborhood recently, and originally was a native of Germany. She makes cards and other items that communicate what she sees through the lens of a camera when she is in nature or with friends. The positive messages she pairs with the resulting images are drawn thoughtfully, through her international sensibility.

The card collection pictured (above right) can be found on Peg's aptly named website: Words and Watercolors. She can be contacted by email.

Ask Rika about her images and handcrafted cards and other items by email or by calling 415.821.1732. The image (above left) is of "Nisha's Rose," a blossom from the rose bush Antwanisha Morgan's family and friends planted at the Quesada Gardens in Antwanisha's memory.

BVHP wellness strategy goes international

The Seva* Partnership, a wellness policy and advocacy project that has connected community members and medical professionals in the service of better health for residents of Bayview Hunters Point, just went international.

Two neighborhood residents, Roberto Ariel Vargas and Sudeep Motupalli Rao, and Dr. Sharad Jain, who directs the Internal Medicine Residency Track program for UCSF at SF General Hospital, delivered a presentation about the partnership to participants at the Community-University Expo 2011 in Ontario, Canada last week. About forty attendees interested in how to better connect education and work in the community setting discovered the Seva* project.

The newly revised Seva* Health Care Policy, Practice and Advocacy Recommendations was made available online so that participants could see the practical results of such a project.

The brief and website emerged from a series of dialogues with residents that Seva* hosted at several community organizations to explore grassroots wisdom about strengths and challenges residents of Bayview Hunters Point experience with regard to staying well.

The community-based participatory research process and resulting policy and advocacy tool were reviewed by an "Accountability Council" of residents, healthcare professionals and community advocates. Key findings include the importance to residents of social cohesion, a clean environment, quality youth mentorship, improved access to care, and a better response to trauma caused by violence.

Miss Jackie on the return to Hunters Point

Miss Jackie works with Hunters Point Family to maintain a community garden that is important to public housing residents and the larger neighborhood. She is featured in a new video that can be found here.

From the story, Superfund City by Crystal Carter

Jackie Williams starts the day off in her neighborhood garden...She checks out her black-eyed-pea plant, and the beans are ready to harvest...She loves her job and she loves where she lives but she doesn’t believe that she will be able to keep these things when the developers come and tear down what she has called home for over 30 years.

“They told us that we need to be ready to move out when they say,” Williams says. “They told us that we’d be able to move back, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Source: spot.us (http://s.tt/12djV)