Danny Woo Garden

Department of Neighborhoods Food Equity Fund grants InterIm CDA Danny Woo Garden and WILD $100,000

Department of Neighborhoods Food Equity Fund grants InterIm CDA Danny Woo Garden and WILD $100,000

Seattle – The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods (DON) has awarded the Danny Woo Garden in Chinatown-International District (CID) and the Wilderness Inner-City Leadership program $100,000 through the Food Equity Fund to support intergenerational learning programs and infrastructure upgrades and repairs that will support community needs in the garden. The Food Equity Fund is a DON program whose purpose is to invest in community-led work that contributes to an equitable and sustainable local food system.

Specifically, this funding will support operations in the Danny Woo Garden in the following ways:

1. Provide equitable and culturally specific food sources in the Danny Woo Garden for low-income, immigrant, refugee, Asian, and Pacific Islander elders in the CID;
2. Provide intergenerational information sharing and learning between elders and API youth about food systems, food justice, and food security through the garden to maintain cultural and ethnic food traditions;
3. Provide funds for infrastructure repairs to maintain sustainable food systems in the garden.

The Danny Woo Garden was created through community activism in 1975 and since then has been a vital source of food security and of maintaining culturally appropriate sources of food for low-income, immigrant, refugee, Asian, and Pacific Islander elders in the CID. Currently, 66 elderly residents utilize close to 100 plots in the 1.5-acre community garden. Over the years, the Danny Woo Garden has fed hundreds of elders. It has also improved their physical and mental health by providing space to be physically and socially active.

Funding will support programs that bring elders and youth together to learn about seed-to-plate practices, culturally specific recipes based on what gardeners have grown, the physical health value of maintaining a healthy diet of ethnic produce, and more. InterIm CDA’s youth program, Wilderness Inner-city Leadership Development (WILD), engages 40-100 low-income API teens ages 14-19 in year-round programming, and the Danny Woo Garden provides a live outdoor classroom for WILD programming that supports two tenets of WILD youth programming: Building intergenerational relationships between API immigrant elders and youth; and learning the value of an organic, culturally relevant garden’s place in a low-income BIPOC community food system. 

Time spent together in the garden among elders and youth creates conversations and experiential information-sharing among generations around concepts of food justice in low-income immigrant and refugee populated communities. Youth gain a holistic understanding of how critical it is for underserved, immigrant communities and individuals to grow what they eat and have access to healthy, organic, culturally relevant, sustainably grown produce.

“Our vision for food equity and sustainability is to honor what our CID community of immigrants and refugees has given up when they’ve left their home countries, usually out of necessity, by giving them space to hold onto their cultural food practices,” said Pradeepta Upadhyay, Executive Director of InterIm CDA. “We also want to ensure this knowledge is passed down to younger generations. We want these culturally unique ties to the land and growing practices to continue here in the CID. This is why we’ve created infrastructure in the garden to support a learning environment for youth.”

Funding will also support much needed infrastructure repairs and ongoing maintenance in the culturally and ethnically responsive garden including for the pig roast pit, chicken coop, one toolshed, the outdoor cookery, maintaining a seed library to offer free seeds to the CID community and garden visitors, cisterns, a boardwalk that allows access to the garden plots, flower beds, and fences and handrails necessary for safety of the elders.

“The garden gave the land back to the old folks who left it in the old country to strike it rich here. They never realized how much they missed the earth,” wrote Bob Santos in his memoir, Humbows Not Hotdogs, about seeing how the creation of the Danny Woo Garden gave back to the elders in the CID and how much they’ve used the garden. This funding helps support this legacy in the CID.

For more information on all awardees, see the DON press release.

Contact: jwasberg@interimcda.org

by Jill Wasberg