The Garden Project
Cathrine Sneed
35 S. Park
San Francisco, Calif. 94107
(415) 243-8558

Let's start this story with Alice, a youngish woman with trim blond hair in a neat ponytail, who could almost pass for a Junior Leaguer -- except for the delicate gold ring in her left nostril.

Alice, who just got out of the San Francisco County Jail after serving a seven-month stretch for robbery, and her co-worker Anthony, a slight young man with a twinkling smile and the chiseled features of an African king, who's done prison time for strong-arm robberies and a bank job, say they'll do almost anything to keep from going back to prison again.

"Nobody wants to go back to jail," Anthony says. "I'm off parole now, and this time I want to do GOOD." Added Alice, who admits she stole to impress her boyfriend, who she describes as a career criminal: "I was crazy. It just didn't make any sense."

They both think they may have found the answer in San Francisco's innovative Garden Project, another of those wonderful grass-roots initiatives that seems almost too simple to be true ... and yet it works.

The project, a half-acre garden located in a long, narrow patch between a grocery store and the Just Desserts/Tassajara Bakery in a gritty neighborhood on San Francisco's south side, very simply gives 20 ex-offenders and a few other lucky poor folks a chance to re-learn the world of work -- and make a few bucks and lunch -- in a supportive setting while they get their lives back together.

All that's required is a commitment to show up on time, get the work done, and make an effort to resolve the problems that stand in the way of moving into the mainstream, Sneed said, telling Anthony on the eve of his first week in the project: "If you make a commitment to us, we'll make a commitment to you."

"Students" work four 5-hour days a week, Alice said, earning only minimum wage; but through a negotiated agreement with the General Assistance office, that income only nominally reduces their welfare grant. More important, she said, it restores a sense of the worth of work, and quite frankly, "It gives me something better to put on my resume than 12 years as a stripper and seven months in jail."

The program grew out of a dream and a nightmare, Sneed said. In the early '80s, when she was a counselor at the county jail, she was frustrated to see so many people returning on new charges only months after getting out. Given a copy of Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" while she was very ill, she was inspired by its characters' hope for a new life on the land to ask County Sheriff Mike Hennessey to let her and several prisoners restore the jail's long-abandoned farm as a work project. He agreed, and before long, the prisoners were not only improving their attitudes through productive labor but also generating enough produce to supply several San Francisco soup kitchens.

The program, which continues under the direction of Arlene Hamilton, now provides 120 tons of produce a year, enough to fully stock four area soup kitchens.

But Sneed still wasn't satisfied, because when prisoners got out of jail, they had to leave the garden behind. So, in 1990, in a remarkable partnership among the sheriff's office, the management of the Just Desserts bakery, and the somewhat grudging agreement of Southern Pacific, which actually owned the garden-to-be, Sneed and a group of volunteers cleared the weeds and garbage that had fouled the vacant lot and turned into The Carroll Street Garden, which was lush with flowers, vegetables and herbs on a recent sunny April morning.

In contrast with the charitable beneficiaries of the horticulture program at the jail, the Carroll Street Garden has potential to become a self-supporting business. It already earns about $100 a week from sales of fruits and herbs to the bakery (which is San Francisco's largest commercial bakery) and to the famous Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. And better still, a number of "graduates" of the program have gone on to higher-paying jobs, mostly at the bakery and in the Tree Project, still another spinoff, in which men and women who've completed the Garden Project are hired by the city at $8 an hour to plant trees in public places.

"This is miracle work," Sneed said, watching Anthony the bank-robber-no-more, perhaps, quietly watering plants. "They've done incredibly hurtful things to others, and themselves. This gives them a chance to do good things ... and they do respond."

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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