Oakland Unified School District

Joshua Sheng
Spring 2021

I did a collaboration with Oakland Unified School District to help construct an oral history for the gardens at the various schools. Many of these gardens were actually quite large and contributed quite a bit to local food production, but there has been little written material describing them in the past. By writing narratives about them, it helps to record the histories of the schools but also allows us to spread the benefits of school gardens (which include climate change mitigation, community integration, and connecting students with nature) around, and thus encourage other schools to create their own garden programs. Something I would like to see in the long term is for food production to be controlled largely by independent small farmers and gardeners, and I feel that this project is a good start for that.