We’ve had another productive week in preparation for our community garden. This summer, we are organizing The 59th Street Garden Youth Summer Program. To recruit participants, we will distribute and post our flyer at nearby schools and community centers:

Joseph is leading the efforts to get a door and a fence for the garden, a lot harder than we expected. A month ago, he purchased several doors for the garden at a retailer at $109 a piece. This week, Joseph returned to purchase the same one just to find out that it was now $149, a price hike of almost 40%. Thankfully, one door for the garden was enough. Aside from dealing with the daily frictions of planning and labor, this experience highlighted an unexpected challenge, inflation’s possible complications on the overall expected costs for our project.

Despite the setback, we expect to have the gate, and with it, the perimeter of the garden secured by this Saturday.

Pedro recently participated in the 2024 Projects for Peace Cohorts with the Americas cohort to connect with a community of more than 120 other teams making contributions to their communities. Pedro met two other teams, one from his city of origin, Mexico City, and another from Alameda County, CA. Our projects shared a youth development component and exchanged ideas. A great suggestion was to incorporate elements to our daily operations to excite youth that’ll be working with us, such as making a playlist with their favorite songs throughout the day, asking them what types of vegetables they would like to grow and what else they would like to see in the garden space.

We’ve made some updates to our budget. We won’t need to expense flight tickets since all of our team members will remain in Chicago this summer. This freed up some much needed cash to get the garden running and to support long-term sustainability. We also realized we can get some materials, such as shovels, leaf blowers and other relevant materials, at a lower price by purchasing second-hand.

We ran into unexpected expenses in putting up the fence to secure the garden, which required additional materials, such as steel tension lines and galvanized corner posts. Fortunately, the reduction of existing expenses and the increase of new ones evened.