When my editor asked me to look into a story about community gardens in Indianapolis, I wasn’t expecting to meet so many people who were so eager to philosophize about abundance and human relationships.
My limited experience with community gardens before I dug into Indy’s urban food scene led me to believe that most set-ups involved solo gardeners paying to till a rented plot of soil, occasionally joined by a reluctant child, who would plant, weed and harvest alongside them. Largely in silence.
Over the past few months, though, I learned that Indianapolis’s shared gardens tend to be much more vibrant things — full of life and noise and fellowship. I was introduced to a community garden model where the soil and seeds are free and neighbors generous with their time and knowledge. The gardeners supply only their hard work.
Across the city, I met Indy residents who have created community gardens, urban farms and other home-grown food initiatives to meet needs they saw across their neighborhoods. Some people I talked to framed their urban farms in the context of helping communities that were under resourced or in need of more produce options.
But members of the Kheprw Institute, which runs several food programs across the city, offered a different perspective, one that emphasized not the deficits that community gardens strive to address but the nourishment and spirit that this kind of collective labor and care can cultivate.
“We live in the reality of the challenges of our community, but we don’t define ourselves primarily by this deficit narrative of what we don’t have,” said Mimi Zakem, an Indianapolis resident who helps run Kheprw’s community controlled food initiative. “We feel like we are best served when we focus on our agency and our resilience and the things that we do have.”
In March, members of the Kheprw Institute invited me to dinner at a house on Boulevard Place in Midtown. It was starting to get dark when I arrived, and the dim living room where dozen or so of us sat on mismatched chairs wasn’t much brighter than the outdoors.
But the meal we shared — venison stew, made from a deer felled on Kheprw’s property near Garfield Park, just three miles south of the circle — was warm. And the company was electric.
It wasn’t that everyone associated with Kheprw’s food work was compelled by nutrition, recipe development or master gardening. Rather, they seemed to be aligned around, and deeply invested in, the community side of growing food.
Over several weeks, I met Kheprw volunteers and associates who in addition to their lives as wilderness experts, aspiring video producers and old-school philosophers were building and maintaining a community-controlled food initiative, an urban farm, a food forest and two community gardens.
“Everybody is in there, sometimes working, sometimes playing,” Imhotep Adisa, the cofounder and executive director of Kheprw, said in an interview. “All that food is, at least in our food work, a natural way to build community with each other.”
I watched Kheprw members tend thousands of seedlings, strategize how to help a local child improve his ability to read, refill each other’s coffee cups, and argue about the merits of white versus brown rice. I witnessed a lot of hard work, a lot of laughter and a lot of affection.
I left chewing on something Adisa had mused about on his living room couch. He said communities, like gardens, are organic and alive. And they need tending to survive.
IndyStar’s environmental reporting is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Sophie Hartley is an IndyStar environment reporter. You can reach her at sophie.hartley@indystar.com or on X at @sophienhartley.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indy residents are building food solutions for themselves
Reporting by Sophie Hartley, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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