Fresh Start Farms
Ruth Brinker, Executive Director (415-695-9670 home)
1095 Market St.
San Francisco, Calif. 94103
(415) 487-9778
(415) 487-9190 fax

At an age when most people are happily contemplating a life of quiet retirement, Ruth Brinker -- having already created one grassroots program that earned her national publicity and a considerable reputation for innovation -- has gone on to begin another entirely different initiative that may just hold even more promise than her previous venture, Project Open Hand.

Brinker, a remarkably creative woman who invented Open Hand, the nation's first (and much-emulated) program providing meals to people with AIDS to help keep them in their homes, was ousted from her position as executive director in what she describes as a political coup mounted by the board chairman, a man she considered a close friend, who persuaded board members that she was "totally burned out and absolutely out of new ideas."

Burned up, not out, she sought to disprove that in the most pragmatic fashion, but converting just one great new idea into a new program with potential for national replication.

That program, Fresh Start Farms, grew to bawling babyhood on a corner lot in urban San Francisco and, at the time of my visit in May 1996, was just in the process of growing into two new sites around the city.

Its basic premise is simple: Hire homeless people to work an urban garden, growing fine, organic salad lettuces that can be sold for high prices to the city's best restaurants, providing the homeless workers a decent wage while returning substantial revenue back into the non-profit organization.

The garden is a beauty: Located on a 100-by-100-foot urban lot at the corner of Divisadero and Ellis in a gentrifying neighborhood, it contains 40 raised garden beds full of rich, black soil and a lush growth of fancy salad lettuce: leaf and oakleaf and endive and escarole. It's a green oasis on a noisy block, but the sounds of traffic, rumbling buses and a grinding garbage truck seemed muted back among the rows of noisy greens, where David, a Russian Jewish immigrant whose English is rapidly improving, and Steve, a well-spoken, thoughtful fellow who's been down on his luck, were working up a sweat digging and moving heavy equipment among the rows. Pretty flowers line a gateway that's open wide and welcoming under a neatly printed sign that reads, FRESH START FARMS.

It's a temporary setting, Brinker explained. Although the lot had been vacant for 30 years and was filled with garbage and old tires when Fresh Start Farms won the city redevelopment agency's approval to use it last year, it looked so much better after they cleared it, brought in topsoil and turned it into a garden that a developer promptly offered the city serious money to develop it as a 10-unit condominium.

So Fresh Start Farms is moving on in the summer of 1996, trucking its topsoil to new beds on the grounds of Visitacion Valley Middle School in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, an isolated, almost rural-looking site in San Francisco's far southeastern corner. They're also negotiating with Mayor Willie Brown to acquire another site in suburban San Mateo County, where warmer conditions would facilitate tomatoes and other produce that doesn't do well in the chilly city.

With the help of a ready market of fine restaurants and chefs who Brinker befriended at Open Hand -- such well-known San Francisco eateries as Fleur de Lis, Postrio The Garden Court and Masa's -- Fresh Start Farms is able to sell all the quality salad mix it can grow for $8.50 a pound, boosting its appeal with guarantees that the produce is all fully organic and so fresh that it reaches the dinner table the same day it is picked. The homeless workers are paid minimum wage to start, but as soon as it's clear they're going to work out, they are Fresh Start Farms (continued) raised to $6 per hour, then $8; a few earn $10. If this were a strictly business proposition, Brinker says, the garden could be self-supporting with a staff of five, covering all its costs through sales. That's not the point, though; job-training is; so she has hired a total of 10 homeless people, making up the difference through grants.

When the new sites are up and running, Brinker hopes to be able to increase production and hire more people. But even that's only the beginning; this woman dreams large dreams. "Before the Industrial Revolution, we didn't have any homeless people, and really no unemployment," she mused. "Everybody worked on farms when we were an agricultural country. Now the Industrial Revolution is history, and most of the jobs it created are gone."

Poor people in the cities don't have access to work, she went on, and modern industrial-agricultural produce is full of chemicals and unappetizing. Meanwhile, California alone is losing 100,000 acres of agricultural land a year to development, and nobody knows how the state or the nation is going to feed itself in the 21st century.

The answer? Brinker envisions a new generation of urban farmers, growing crops on every vacant city lot and, when those run out, in raised-bed gardens on building rooftops. "If we can do that here, and if others in other cities can do the same," she said, "We'll be able to feed the people."

As I said, it's a large dream. Given her track record, who's to say that Ruth Brinker can't make it happen?

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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