Beacon Food Forest

Seven-Acres in Seattle

The Beacon Food Forest is one of our favorite projects to talk about. The genesis of this big successful project came from Jenny Pell teaching a permaculture design certification course. The students’ final presentation had to showcase all the things they learned during the course. Concepts like water systems, food systems, appropriate technology systems, and decision making within the group.

They chose to design a seven-acre piece of land right in the middle of a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Seattle. It’s a very diverse and low-income neighborhood. It has communities of Vietnamese, Latino, Ethiopian, multi-generational African American families, new immigrants, Thai, Filipino, Chinese, everyone is represented in this neighborhood.

The neighborhood surrounded a whole city block that had blackberries, barbed wire fences, and a reservoir on top. There was no way through that, this is a giant reservoir. In the interest of homeland security, the city of Seattle decided that it was in danger, anyone had access to it and somebody could poison the reservoir. They felt it needed to be capped so they installed a large concrete tank and created 40 acres of new land in the middle of the city.

Beacon Food Forest Has Everything

They did an amazing design on the new acres. There’s everything from a skate park, a community center, an after-school program, a big playground, tennis courts, dog walking and benches to enjoy the beautiful trees and landscape. Now this park is an intersection of all these communities.

On the western flank of that our students came up with a design, to have a food forest that served the community. It was a design exercise, and their presentation was just stellar, and they went on to write a grant.

The Grant Process

Seattle has a great program called the Department of Neighborhoods, not all cities have a Department of Neighborhoods, but Seattle does and they give grants of all different sizes from $15,000 to $50,000 and more.

The team wrote a Department of Neighborhoods grant for a design for a permaculture food forest on that western flank. It’s a government project so it had to go through the request for proposal process (RFP). The RFP specified that the project had to have a permaculture specialist on the team.

It was so awesome! We were getting phone calls from different landscape architect firms asking if we’d be on their team? But we had our own team, thank you and then we won the bid for the contract. We worked with the landscape architect and all the rest.

Multi-Stake Holders

We found out that the land was owned by public utilities. Now we are in a multi-stakeholder scenario, which is something you have to navigate. If you’re going to do policy work, or if you’re really going to influence change, you have to embrace that you have a multi-stakeholder reality, what that looks like, and how you navigate that.

We had the designers, the surrounding multi-ethnic community, which you have to do community outreach, you have the Department of Neighborhoods, public utilities, Seattle parks, the police, because the police have to have what’s called a line of sight, so that they can make sure nothing bad is happening, and the project also runs along a bus line, the list just went on and on.

Community Outreach

The Department of Neighborhoods required that we perform public outreach. We learned that the first meeting was attended by permaculturists, from all over the area, who didn’t live in that neighborhood. Everyone was so excited, but they did not live in that community.

We had to really rethink our invitations after that. For the next public outreach, we specifically targeted. We consulted with people on how do get people from the Chinese community here? And we were told, you have to have dinner? How do you get people from the African community? We were told you have to have African American committee and childcare. How do we get more Latino, Hispanic people? You have to have a translator.

We had to really learn how to engage with the community to find out what they wanted in a project like that, and then the design unfolded from there.

Political Challenges

There is a lot of obstruction that comes from policymakers, we had to be prepared to overcome them. We had to anticipate the various objections that could be raised for this project and we had to be able to give them confidence that the project will be managed well.

When we first started with public utilities, they were very anti the project, even though we had been awarded the bid, even though we had gotten the grant, and all that stuff. They were concerned about rats, they didn’t want it to become a vector for disease. We advised them on rat free compost and we had to assure them that we were going to teach people in the neighborhood how to have rat free compost.

Success Story

Jump ahead 10 years and the project has been wildly successful. There’s been a lot of learning about how to manage a group that is that diverse, and they have a Board of Directors. They have work parties where 100 people show up at every work party. They have summer camp, they collaborate with the University of Washington Architect Department and the students designed and built a whole series of shelters there. They have collaborated with the Seattle pea patch, which is a small gardening plot group that there’s like 3000 patches across Seattle. And you can have your little plot. They have a whole pea patch there. They give garden tours and people from around the world visit and are fascinated by this project.

Going Viral

At the very beginning of the project, a young friend of mine, Robert Malinger, who was a fledgling writer looking for a project to write about. We suggested he write about the beacon food forest and so he did. He did his research and wrote a great article for Crosscut Magazine in Seattle. That went global, it was one of those viral things that caught everybody’s imagination. And that sort of circles right back to the food islands, what is it about this project that is just so exciting for people? What is it about this project that made 1000s of bloggers pick it up, that we were on the radio every week for around two years, that delegations come from other countries to visit this project, that people plan their trip to go to Seattle to see the Beacon Food Forest?

What we’ve decided is that what is so compelling about the Beacon Food Forest, or the food island in your backyard is that it’s doable. It’s not hard, it’s accessible. It’s something you can learn. It’s something that’s fun, you get to meet new people, you get to plant a tree, you get to have food growing, and people would look at this food forest project and say, I want one of those in my city. Why don’t we have one of those? And there begins the conversation with the policymakers. Where can we have a food forest?

The takeaway, the drops that fill buckets is that they give people things to do that are achievable and have some endurance, whether or not they’re always engaged with maintaining it. The ripple from this project was the creation of a tree gleaning project.