Strategic Priorities
Racial Equity - Over the Rhine is a historically black neighborhood along with Cincinnati itself, and the lack of black leadership in the leadership of this urban garden inn downtown Cincinnati was jarring, and was our number one priority in developing this coalition.
Asynchronous Documentation and Learning: We knew that what made the leadership of this garden tough over the years was the lack of consistent leadership and many different stakeholders so we kept the need of consistent communication at the forefront. Part of this urban garden, becoming a community resource that is able to continually serve the community means. Documenting along the way became essential to not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Extend institutional resources - We were specifically looking to partner with Universities. It is our goal to distribute institutional resources that are typically focused at universities, but have the potential to impact the communities they serve.
Challenges
Permaganic Leadership Transition
We started off with interviews with the existing leadership, along with several past community partners like the Civic Garden Center and Rothenberg Rooftop Garden. There are always surprises that come from taking over leadership from another organization. The most surprising items were that the former leadership was handing out bongs to the community and they took down a fence that was required to have on the property by the lease holder. These initial discoveries led our team to place extra care on the interviews. This project was a reminder to respect history, but history sometimes needs to be questioned because of some of the harm it has caused.
Growing Pains
Because this project meant bringing on representative leadership, there were pain points and challenges in leadership in letting go and that is how Base Builder Labs was able to become a strategic partner in developing a better partnership with the group with documentation. A lot of the challenges with the growing pains were understanding that the space that are typically been used for programming needed to evolve to focus more in on education. Historically the space was designated for education 200 years ago, but overtime had lost its way so in order to grow into the old version of itself, that was a pain point for other organizations to get behind because it meant changing the view of what the space was four in their minds..
Partnerships
This project was focusing on developing the partners in order to protect this land from development. Every partnership is unique because every partner has unique needs and focuses on different goals for success. We feel it necessary to cover each partnership separately because of the focus of each partnership having a different goal.
Central State University
We began discussions with central state, actually at a community listening session for Cincinnati. They wanted to be more involved in the community for years, but the relationships have been contentious because of changes in leadership and lack of communication on both sides. With recent transitions in leader ship of the central state, office and federal Lee, we record a meeting in order to start fresh with the Cincinnati Area, because we knew the partnership of an HBCU in the Cincinnati area was necessary, but needed a new approach. Conversations led to a tour and some further discussions around programming that they had to be a fit, and it led to the urban garden site, becoming a partner for the fast track farming program. The FST TRACK program pays a staff person to manage along with bringing educational resources to location for community residence to experience.
Ohio State University
And our initial due diligence for this project, we learned that Ohio State extension office was less than a mile from the gardening site. We had it on our map of partners to reach out to, but found that they were having an event for black farmers in December 2024. Because we knew that we wanted to be in partnership already and they're already having this program. We reached out ahead of time and set up some time to do a tour and it has led to some fruitful discussions and possibility of long term partnership for their extension office.
Civic Garden Center
Civic Garden Center has been involved in the space over the years as one of the program partners. We collaborated with them to hold a volunteer event at the garden, and it was fruitful in helping us restart that relationship, because of the harm from previous leadership in Permaganic
Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH)
POAH are the landlords for the 2 storefronts that are part of the campus. For years, Permaganic had been renting from this space but hadn't been great neighbors. They lost keys and awareness to who had access to the space creating an unsafe environment for neighbors. Because of this knowledge, we knew that the number one priority was becoming an advocate for the neighbors who live most adjacent to the part of the campus that would be the most advocated to make sure their basic housing needs were not threatened before we engaged with them and continued to activate the space. We are planning to use this starting step to improve the overall relationship with POAH for this project to ensure that the space remains a community benefit.
MANNRS (Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences)
As we explored program partners, it became clear that we needed an organization partner in addition to institutional partners to create more education opportunities. MANNRS is an organization with history and infrastructure across many universities across the country.
Partnerships Perspective
The most exciting thing from the partnership development that is confirm this project is that the partners tend to bleed into each other, because we're one partner offer something another partner is looking for some thing, and it has been extremely rewarding to see them gel together, and it shows how large institutional partners can work across varied differences. There are many partnerships still in development for this project.
