Before he became the coordinator of the Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College, Brian Noy used to ride his bike past the empty lot near the entrance to the college.  “I always wanted to make a community garden there,” he says. “It’s an interesting blessing to be employed to do it.”

Brian wasn’t the only one: the president of Augsburg College also looked at the space and saw possibility, so two summers ago, a community garden took shape: 40 individual plots tended by students, faculty, staff and members of the community. They envisioned it as “a place where neighbors and the campus community could work together,” said Brian. (That’s not the only president interested in community gardens: Obama is  starting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn.)

More recently, coordination of the garden has come under the umbrella of CKAC.  In fact, although the ground is still frozen, they just started accepting applications for plots this week. For Brian, this is both exciting and intimidating: although he’s been working on youth gardening and with food service for years, this will be the first time he’s tried to grow his own food.

A young gardener and his radish at CKAC's community garden

That’s in addition to coordinating the project, where his biggest challenge will be “instill a sense of ownership in the community of gardeners,” he said. It’s important that the gardeners not only produce food, but make the space look presentable.

Yet the rewards will hopefully be plentiful. He describes the full garbage bags of broccoli greens and kale they collected toward the end of the season last year, which they sauteed with some bacon to make “really good greens.”

More than just good food, the community garden,  like The Campus Kitchens Project, is about “connecting communities through food and using food as a tool for social justice,” said Brian. And although he said it can sometimes be a challenge to succinctly describe, he sees the relationship between the local food movement and The Campus Kitchens Project as “a pretty natural fit.” From the farmers who produce to the people in neighborhoods who primarily have access to highly processed food, “there are people struggling on both ends.”

The role of CKAC, as Brian sees it, is “providing avenues for people to engage in food.” They’re doing it not just through their community garden, but also through becoming a drop off point for local CSAs. Of the 25 shares that get dropped off every week, they’re usually able to get 3-5 donated or at reduced cost. Brian sees the CSA project as not only a way to support farmers, but also to help tell their story.

Like many universities across the country, Augsburg College is also working on starting a farmer’s market, which would be tied to CKP: an opportunity for those farmers to tell their own stories to the folks who will eat what they’ve grown.

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