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:
- Provide equitable and culturally specific food sources for low-income, immigrant, refugee, Asian, and Pacific Islander elders in the CID;
- 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;
- And provide funds for infrastructure repairs to maintain sustainable food systems in the garden.
Currently, 66 elderly residents utilize close to 100 plots in Danny Wood Garden, which has 1.5-acres. Over the years, it has fed hundreds of elders, and improved their physical and mental health by providing space to be physically and socially active.
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.
“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.”