Thursday, August 15, 2013

Bayview's gardening community hosts Gay for Good, Saturday


Community-minded volunteers from the service organization Gay for Good will be at the Quesada Gardens in the heart of San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood on Saturday, August 17th from 9am until 12:30pm.  (Meet-up on the 1700 block of Quesada, just west of 3rd Street.)

“Gay for Good moves mountains,” said organizer Steve Carp when he learned his group would be facing a mountain of mulch needing spread throughout Bayview’s showcase urban gardens on Quesada Avenue and 3rd Street.

Volunteers will also build retaining walls and planting beds to create a new educational hub that Bayview residents have designed for a portion of their garden. That hub already includes a demonstration Nourishmat from Earth Starter that helps new gardeners understand the square-foot gardening model. New herb beds, a composter, and a community posting board are next.

Hundreds of people each year visit the series of community-generated projects, known as Quesada Gardens, to learn about grassroots community building in urban cores like Bayview Hunters Point. Not all of them get their hands as dirty as Gay for Good volunteers are likely to on Saturday.

“We are delighted that Gay for Good is coming back to Bayview,” said Quesada Gardens’ organizer Jeffrey Betcher. “I love how they connect the benefits of networking within a social or cultural group to the kind of place-based community building that Quesada Gardens does.”

The Quesada Gardens Initiative has been growing gardens, gathering spaces and public art projects in the heart of San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood since 2002. The grassroots group hopes that one day everyone in the neighborhood will know their neighbors.

Gay for Good – San Francisco aims to energize and mobilize the LGBT community to provide community service. Each month, the group selects a different non-profit to be the beneficiary of its volunteerism.

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