National Rebuilding Day 2019: Showing Our Love at Koshland

Rebuilding Together SF, SheBuilds

This April, Rebuilding Together San Francisco (RTSF) is working with CommunityGrows to build new garden plots, create a garden classroom, and revitalize the space at Koshland Community Park and Learning Garden. Since 1989, Rebuilding Together SF has “provide[d] home repair and renovation programs for their San Francisco neighbors, nonprofit organizations and community spaces. The work [they] do creates safer and healthier environments,” and this year will be including CommunityGrows as a nonprofit partner as part of their SheBuilds initiative.
Our staff has been working safely, and sweatily, to keep the gardens growing this year. We have been fortunate enough to be able to spend time outside and grow food for the community we love, even if we’re at a reduced capacity. Everything considered, we thought a little update on some of our gardens was due, so this post will run you through what’s happening in the Rosa Parks and Koshland gardens.

All Women, No Boundaries

Each year, RTSF hosts an annual event called National Rebuilding Day during which they engage 300-500 volunteers over three weekends in April to make improvements on homes and community spaces around San Francisco. The SheBuilds programs complements the National Rebuilding Day by mobilizing women from different skilled trades, local companies, and partners to tackle projects with volunteer teams powered by women. CommunityGrows is very excited to work with RTSF and the SheBuilds volunteers to revitalize and increase the community and green space at Koshland!

The Project

Since the project scoping began back in 2018, the goal for the She Builds/ National Rebuilding Day is to increase the existing green space at Koshland and to build on and revitalize the awesome space that is already there. With the help of the SheBuilds volunteers, we will plant new trees, native plants, and pollinator plants in the underutilized SW corner of the garden; we will build new planter boxes for community gardeners; and we will create a new garden classroom for the students in our Environmental Education and Seed-to-Mouth programs. The project will create a space that will not only be educational for our students, but can be enjoyed neighbors and community members as well!

Pruning and clearing some space for new raised planter boxes!

Our Thanks

This process has definitely been a team effort and we are very grateful for the support, time, and work that all of the partners have put into this project. So with that on our minds, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few people:

  • The student team from the Architecture & Community Design program at the University of San Francisco for creating the original plans and ideas on how to build out the space in the SW corner;
  • Our amazing liaison at Rec and Park for answering all of our questions, coming out to multiple site visits, and just generally for being amazing;
  • Rebuilding Together for guiding us through the process and providing the volunteers, materials, and knowledge to make this project possible – and to the CommunityGrows team of project leaders and skilled volunteers for working so hard on the planning and organizing;
  • To PG&E and the ReLeaf team for providing CommunityGrows with a grant to support this project;
  • And to our amazing educators at Koshland, whom we could not do this without!

There’s still a lot of work to be done before the build day, but we are excited and thankful for the amazing team surrounding us and everything that has been accomplished so far!