The Gardens Are Growing

Common Grounds, the Horizons Community Gardens have come alive. The Humboldt Garden in Bingen, lower photo, has produced more than 700 pounds of healthy food so far this season for the Bingen food bank and more is coming. The Skyline Garden, upper photo, is the pride and joy of more than a dozen families at Rhine Village apartment complex.
The Horizons garden team is already looking for new garden sites to develop for 2009. One likely site will be a children's garden at the Youth Center in White Salmon.

Welcome to the Horizons Blog for the communities of Bingen and White Salmon in Western Klickitat County, WA

Horizons Program overview

Horizons is a community leadership program aimed at reducing poverty in small rural communities. It is funded by the Northwest Area Foundation and facilitated through Washington State University. Bingen and White Salmon are fortunate that they are eligible for this program.

The Community Circles phase was completed this spring when many participants attended several sessions to understand poverty and develop ideas to reduce it. Following that, four members of our community attended three days of training in Moses Lake, shown in the picture. One person, Bruce Bolme, received intensive media and public relations training. The other three people, Zoe Campbell, Ubaldo Hernandez and Wendi Zeober, received Leadership Plenty instruction.

Leadership Plenty is being offered this summer and will be offered again this fall. Participants in the Community Circles and Leadership Plenty will then work together to lead a community visioning process. That process will produce a community vision that will result in solid action on leadership and poverty.

Common Grounds Community Gardens have arrived in Bingen and White Salmon

The Food and Education Action Team of the Horizons Program in Bingen and White Salmon is now the Common Grounds Team. The team has been meeting weekly, and sometimes more often, planning and promoting our community gardens. We are proceeding with two gardens. Humboldt Garden is near Daubenspeck Park in Bingen and Skyline Garden is next to the Rhine Village apartment complex in White Salmon. Each garden will contain plots for about 24 families.
Garden plots are four feet wide and range from 10 to 25 feet in length. The cost to each gardener is one dollar per foot of length with the money going to pay for water and some basic tools. Registration began Saturday April 19. The next registration day is Saturday April 26 from 10 a.m. to noon and will take place at each site. Both gardens are scheduled to be ready and open for gardening on April 28.
Many volunteers, including a local Brownie troop and a crew of community service workers, have helped with all the work prepareing the gardens. On April 19, volunteers using heavy equipment moved a donated shed to the Skyline Garden to be used for tool and material storage. Of course, more volunteers are very welcome. Call Bruce Bolme at 493-8202 or Timi Keene at 493-5263 to lend a hand or learn more about the gardens.

Horizons Program Sponsors Michael Shuman Workshop

On April 15, Michael Shuman, nationally known author of Going Local and The Small Mart Revolution, addressed a group of about 60 Washington citizens in a workshop on How We Can Build a Prosperous Local Economy. At the workshop held at the Grace Baptist Church in White Salmon, Michael presented ideas on what local communities can do to create vibrant, self-reliant, community-based economic networks. He also highlighted trends in the national and global economy and explained how consumers, investors, policymakers and others can revitalize their own communities.

Horizons Program Sponsors a Global Classroom Course

From March 20 through April 17, several citizens of Bingen and White Salmon attended a global classroom course with the title Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. It was a global classroom because the course lectures were broadcast on the internet simultaneously all over the globe from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students had to be early risers to attend each 90 minute class which began at 7 a.m. local time. Grass roots leaders attending the course learned about overcoming personal limitations and expanding their capacity for listening, observing, creating and facilitating action, first at the personal level, then expanding it to the group, institutional and finally global levels.

WGAP Supports the Local Horizons Program

WGAP or Washington Gorge Action Programs has agreed to be the fiscal sponsor for the Horizons Program activitie in the Bingen - White Salmon area, including our community gardens. WGAP will be the custodian of grant monies, donations and garden fees for the local Horizons Program. As Horizons activities increase, those funds will be used for education and training as well as community gardens. Soon we will be making an announcement about the Northside Community Education Project.

Dr. Donna Beegle Workshop on Generational Poverty

SEE POVERTY…Be the Difference!

That is the title of the book by Dr. Donna Beegle. On Oct 17, 2007, at the Grace Baptist Church in White Salmon, she presented a workshop on generational poverty and how to help people move out of it. There was a great turnout from many different social services and agencies, including Horizons. Donna heads an organization, Communication Across Barriers (www.combarriers.com). This site, and her book, explore common myths and stereotypes about people who live in poverty.

The workshop highlighted elements of poverty that people who are not poor often don’t recognize. One example is the world-view and concepts that poverty teaches, and how it is very different from that of non-poor people. An important component of understanding generational poverty is to recognize that the preferred communication and learning style is not the same as those of the middle class. Oral culture is most often found in poverty situations, and it emphasizes their interconnection with the environment and the people in it. They are highly attuned to their senses and pay much attention to the sensory information received from the world. This is the first and inborn preference of humans.

On the other hand, print culture is a learned way of relating to the world. It involves process and analysis – the breaking down of things according to parts.

The exercises we did at the workshop, particularly the Personal Socio-Economic Status, was very enlightening to us.

For more information about Donna and her work, check out her website, listed above, and consult her excellent book, also mentioned above.