OSS Project’s VISSION
• We believe in the power and benefits of partnering with artists and designers as facilitators for community development.
• Our vision is to create healthier, more resilient, and more connected communities through the co-creation of urban gardens, artwork, and educational programming.
• We use the garden as a starting point for our programs. Artists and designers team up with communities to build these gardens where challenges, ideas or identities are addressed.
• Food literacy, renewable energy, race, cultural coexistence, nutrition, self-sufficiency, and physical and mental wellbeing have been addressed at our gardens, reflected in the design of the gardens’ structure, layout, plants and activities.
The sense of interconnectedness, mutualism, and care that strives from the act of gardening creates the ideal place to foster more sustainable and healthier communities. We envision our work making an impact in the following ways:
Culturally: Our gardens and programs are spaces where culture and heritage are honored and passed down to future generations.
Socially: Our gardens provide access to food, opportunity to learn new skills, and team building.
Economically: Our gardens and programs contribute to mentoring self-sufficiency, community ownership; and incubate ideas that can support the local economy.
Environmentally: Our gardens and programs enable us to practice eco-stewardship; and to be spaces within the larger urban environment that strengthen and sustain how we care for the planet.
General view of OSS#MH’s garden
DAP GARDEN
Dyckman Houses & Asha Hanna
OUR PROGRAMS
NEW PLACES
New Places is a year program through which each community selects an artist to design and build a garden to be used as a platform for empowerment and development
The program follows public outreach, design, constructions, oral history documentation, community engagement strategies, programing and fundraising, giving each garden and its members the tools to become a more sustainable AND SELF-SUFFICIENT by reclaiming their identity and knowledge.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Each garden serves as a centerpiece to articulate public programming that further discusses the ideas addressed in each community.
Offering our regular programs to the garden members, the residents of the C developments where we work and the extended community. We establish partnership with local community centers, senior centers, public schools, etc and provide programing in the garden for their after school programs, summer camps, or special events/field trips.
E amples include workshops in gardening, cooking, medicinal plants, sef-care, theater, dance, foraging, nutrition or memory building. We have also organized readings, assemblies, panels, performances and concerts.
OSS#MH Recovering Ancestral Knowledge Workshop Facilitated by Happy Healthy Latina
PUBLIC PROGRAM
COOKING GARDENING
WELLBEING
OUTERSEEDSHADOW.ORG
