Homeless Shelter Opens Community Garden In The East Village

EAST VILLAGE, NY — An East Village homeless shelter has turned a standard slab of concrete into a community garden for its residents and neighbors to enjoy.

Project Renewal, the longtime housing and social services charity for homeless individuals, celebrated the opening of its new community garden on Wednesday. The garden brings a welcome addition to the organization's oldest shelter on Third Street. The green space, which includes seating area for the shelter's residents and a greenhouse where they'll be able to grow fresh food, arrives thanks to a partnership between Project Renewal, the local community board, and the Department of Homeless Services.

Project Renewal officially opened the garden and celebrated 50 years of work in the city during a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday. The garden will serve multiple functions for the dozens of residents of the Third Street Shelter, most importantly serving as a critical tie to the surrounding neighborhood, said the nonprofit's President and CEO Mitchell Netburn.

"By seeing people outside, it breaks down those stereotypes," Netburn said. "We all have that image of a homeless person as someone who lives inside a shelter. Here, for the community to see people [out in the garden], and maybe come inside and talk to them, it just breaks down those barriers."

The often-tense relationship between homeless shelters and neighboring residents has been a topic of frequent discussion since Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to add 90 new homeless shelters throughout the city to address a burgeoning housing crisis. The garden, along with Project Renewal's ties to the communities where it works, were heralded as a model for building sustainable partnerships between homeless shelters and their neighbors.

Joslyn Carter, the administrator for the Department of Homeless Services, said Project Renewal has excelled at avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach to helping homeless men and women.

"We want to look at how we work with communities so that when we come into a community, we land right," Carter said. "At Project Renewal they really look at individual needs for who are placed there and trying to meet those needs."

The garden, which will soon include a greenhouse, will allow men living at the Third Street shelter to spend time outdoors, learn to grow and harvest herbs and vegetables and to socialize in a pleasant environment, Netburn said.

Project Renewal also runs a culinary institute, where clients can get job training skills in the culinary industry and provide food for residents. Once the greenhouse is up and running, organizers said, its harvest will be used by the culinary institute's students.

Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer and City Council Member Rosie Mendez, who represents the East Village, both spoke at the ribbon cutting in support of the garden and Project Renewal's work.

Project Renewal, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, was the first private nonprofit to contract with the city to run homeless shelters.

Netburn said that the as homelessness remains a persistent issues throughout the five boroughs, he thinks more and more providers will need to provide comprehensive services for homeless people, as Project Renewal has worked to do during its 50-year expansion. The nonprofit has expanded from its very first shelter to offer mental health and substance abuse services, primary healthcare, job training and transitionary housing.

"We don't want somebody to have to go to five people to get all the services they need," Newburn said of Project Renewal's future. "They need go to one person get all the services they need and treat them as a whole."

Lead image: Ciara McCarthy / Patch