Coming out of our individual discussions with all the key stakeholders, we developed several important guiding principles for the Gordonsville Community Garden project. Each situation is different and we have not seen similar principles documented elsewhere, but in our case we decided to:
- Replace the typical Community Garden approach (in which individuals can rent one or two beds for their own personal use) with a model in which the garden is operated by volunteers and the produce is distributed at no charge to Gordonsville residents in need,
- Avoid establishing a new organization to support and operate the garden, and instead have it operated by one or more existing organizations, and
- Help leverage the Gordonsville Community Garden learnings as broadly as possible, ideally evolving to a nation-wide “pay it forward” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward) paradigm.
- One More TBD