Culture & Community | Education & Youth | Environment | Food Justice | Nature | Newhallville | CPEN
The newest garden off Shelton Avenue, and some of its youngest fans. Lucy Gellman and Kim Harris Photos.
As he walked down Shelton Avenue Sunday, Steffon Miller stopped in his tracks, lifting up a phone to record what he was seeing. Over a fence, shades of green fanned out in every direction: a spray of chartreuse from the radishes and basil, emerald from the still-tender kale, heads of butter lettuce that glowed lime green if you looked at them the right way.
Further back, a duo of tomatoes had begun to ripen, turning to a ruby red. A blanket of woodchips underfoot made everything smell sweet.
Monday afternoon, Miller joined neighbors, friends, garden educators, and green thumbs of all ages as part of the inaugural “Taste of Newhallville Community Festival,” an initiative of Inspired Communities, Inc., the Newhallville Community Management Team, Community Placemaking Engagement Network (CPEN), Mount Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church and the Newhallville STREET Garden fêting the joy of fresh food and vibrant culture in the community.
An afternoon-long celebration, the festival offered tours of the garden, the Newhallville Learning Corridor and UrbanScapes Native Plant Nursery, as well as planting demonstrations and chances to sample and take home fresh produce. A chartered bus took neighbors to a mix of nearby cultural hubs, including the Inspired Your Way Center, Harris & Tucker School, and a new adventure park at Spurle Space at 91 Shepard St.
Harris on Shelton Avenue at the end of the event. Lucy Gellman Photo.
“It’s about building relationships in our community,” said Inspired Communities, Inc. Founder Kim Harris, who co-directs Harris & Tucker School with her cousin, Karen Tucker. She motioned down Shelton Avenue. “How do you inspire possibilities? [In the garden] they [kids] get a chance to see things grow. A lot of these kids are losing SNAP, and they are still gonna be able to eat.”
For Harris, who grew up in Newhallville and is the second-generation co-owner of Harris & Tucker, it is part of a longer-running vision for the neighborhood that she’s been growing for years. Since 2022, she’s been teaching young students at the school about Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), public health jargon for the way one’s lived experience——neighborhood, environment, income, education, and access to things like fresh food—affects health outcomes.
Those kids, in turn, have worked to teach their friends, families and neighbors about SDoH, taking the message from their homes to their schools to their houses of worship. Three years ago, they held their first summit on the topic at the LAB at ConnCORP, where they presented a Children’s Bill of Rights. Monday, they chatted about SDoH while leading tours of the garden, which has bloomed from a once-dilapidated plot of land at the corner of Ivy Street and Shelton Avenue.
Lucy Gellman Photos.
The land, which comes from Mount Zion SDA Church, owes its success in part to garden manager Stacy Maddern, a UConn professor in the department of geography, sustainability, community, and urban studies who makes the trip from Storrs three times a week. Sunday, he was working away in the garden with a team of volunteers, some turning hot dogs on the grill as others grooved to a smooth sax cover of “Just My Imagination.”
“You know The Other Side of Prospect? We talk about ‘The Other Side of Newhallville,’” Harris said. Recently, she learned that in Prospect Hill—an affluent, mostly white neighborhood less than a mile away—the average life expectancy is seven to 11 years longer than it is in her neighborhood. “These kids are going to be able to catch up. This is their garden.”
She added that it’s made possible by dedicated advocates like Madden and neighborhood boosters, including Harris & Tucker students who get the word out as members of her “street team.” After Mount Zion donated the land—Harris belongs to the church—Madden worked with a team of gardeners to bring the space to life. It operates on the concept of Hugelkültur, a centuries-old German method of gardening that is meant to replicate what happens in a forest.
Adam Rawlings, who works as a community engagement specialist at Neighborhood Housing Services, explained Monday that the idea is to allow organic matter—tree branches, for instance—to biodegrade in the same way they would in nature, rather than with man-made interventions. On top of that organic matter is where gardeners lay the soil from which plants grow.
He gestured to high, sweet-scented mounds of woodchips that act as a buffer between the ground, which is full of lead and unsafe for planting, and the soil from which veggies and flowers now safely grow. In its first year alone, the garden has turned out tomatoes, kale, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, watermelon, pumpkin, and calaloo among other plants (it is still very much in bloom, and will likely be for a few more months before the winter sets in).
It is not the first vegetable garden to spring up on Shelton Avenue: there is another right across the street, as well as one at 96 Shepard St. one on Starr Street, and a plant nursery that CPEN runs across from the Learning Corridor.
Monday afternoon, several Harris & Tucker students made their way through the garden as others ventured to the Learning Corridor, checked out pollinators, hopped on bus tours and finished the afternoon with face paint and fresh back-to-school haircuts. Ketrese Barnes, a mother of two young attendees, said she was thrilled to see the festival spring into action.
For years, she’s seen the work that Harris has done to build up the community. This festival just marks the latest chapter.
“The kids worked hard in those gardens and they [the plants] grew perfectly,” she said in a phone call Tuesday evening. “A lot of the stuff Ms. Kim does is out of the kindness of her heart. She looks out for any and everyone.”
Lucy Gellman and Kim Harris Photos.
Her children, nine-year-old Ke'loni and five-year-old Tylon, have been with Harris & Tucker long enough that the school feels more like family than an educational institution, she added. By the end of the afternoon Monday, their hearts and hands were both full: Barnes and her kids left with squash, eggplant and peppers, with plans to make fresh eggplant parmesan after they’d picked up a few additional ingredients.
They aren’t the only ones: Maddern has worked with distribution hubs like Harris & Tucker, the Dixwell Senior Center and Newhallville booster Brother Born, who holds weekly breakfasts, to create channels through which fresh food will get to people who live in the neighborhood.
As he took in the rows of vegetables, Miller echoed that excitement, praising “anything that does something to revitalize the community.” Growing up in New Haven’s Kensington neighborhood, Miller rarely felt like he had something to keep him busy as a kid. It ultimately led to a string of bad decisions that ended in prison, he said. Now as a member of Reformed Offenders Creating Change, he wants to help create the community framework—especially for youth—that he once longed for.
“I support all of the community events!” he said. “I just love to see when we can all come together. You know, it’s about knowing who your neighbors are. We’re all one village.”
That sense of community—the need to build it, and also to maintain—extended down the block, as CPEN Founder and garden educator Doreen Abubukar gathered attendees around a single patio table, surrounding a small, delicate green plant with dirt. As she worked, she explained that it was butterfly weed, a plant in the milkweed family that is increasingly important as monarch butterflies face an alarming drop in population that have landed them on the endangered species list.
“That’s what it loves,” Abubukar said of monarchs. She patted the dirt around the plant as she spoke, her voice warm and even. “It puts its babies on them.”
Lossie Gorham, who has lived on Bassett Street for three decades, listened intently, chiming in with a murmur of agreement every so often. Born and raised on a farm in North Carolina, Gorham knows firsthand what it’s like to grow and eat her own vegetables. As a kid, she always had fresh food from the farm, including sweet and white potatoes and canned vegetables that got the family through the winter.
Now, years later, she’s excited to see some of those same efforts take root in the community. At her home on Bassett Street, Gorham has a garden on her porch, with plants and produce that turn it into a contained urban oasis. With several neighbors, she’s part of a push to keep gardens in the neighborhood, including where affordable housing has been proposed on Starr Street.
Top: Doreen Abubukar in action. Bottom: Lossie Gorham, Former Newhallville Alder Delphine Clyburn, Nesta Felix, and Tameka Pearson. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Monday, she was glad to learn more about milkweed—and about Abubukar’s efforts to beautify the community, she said. So was Tameka Pearson, a Starr Street neighbor who turned out last month to testify against a new housing development that would encroach on the “Big Starr” garden that feeds so many in the community. For her, Pearson said, the festival was all about growing community connections that would create a stronger neighborhood.
“My goal is to get to know who is running the gardens,” she said. She is interested in having her children, who are 17 and 20, get involved in planting efforts.
“This is big for me!” chimed in Starr Street neighbor Nesta Felix with a laugh, lifting her plant gently into the air in gentle celebration. “I’m gonna fight the urge to hand this to my husband and say, ‘Make this grow.’”
Abubukar, who marks four years in the garden, said she’s glad to see the community coming together to both celebrate and cultivate change in the neighborhood. Each time she collaborates with Harris, she meets different people, from new neighbors to students to people who spread the word about weekly breakfasts in the Newhallville Learning Corridor.
Recently, organizations like Rock to Rock and the Urban Resources Initiative have been working with CPEN to host their events there. She’d love to see more of that going forward, particularly as the group grows out a new fishing area behind King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School.
“My hopes are really that we get the Learning Corridor more active,” she said. “How do you transform underutilized spaces into either a nature connection or a people connection? And it’s really something that we need more of in Newhallville. I definitely see that there’s more need of engagement.”
Barber Jeremy Ashe: "Some good, positive vibes can go a long way."
Back on Shelton Avenue, Harris was packing up for the day, taking everything in. She looked out over the street, which hours before had become lively, dotted with the signature red t-shirts of her preschool students and their parents. Now, it was relatively quiet again: a few kids played on the playground outside Lincoln-Bassett, and a quartet of friends bounced a basketball on the courts. A neighbor held her dog still for a moment, waiting for a light to change.
Harris, meanwhile, looked ahead. Eventually, she said, she’d like to buy the building at 234 Shelton Ave. that houses the Inspired Communities, Inc. center, where the windows reveal a room cozily filled with books. She can already imagine turning it into the “ABCT Center,” a youth-focused space that would teach agriculture, business development, community building and technology to kids in the neighborhood.
Until that time, she’s working closely with other occupants of the building like Jeremy Ashe to make Newhallville more welcoming for the people who call it home. Ashe, who grew up in the neighborhood and Monday was offering free haircuts to kids, is the third-generation owner of Ashe’s Barber Shop, which his grandfather Charles opened in the 1980s.
When Harris talked to him about the festival, getting involved felt like a no-brainer.
“I just feel like positivity is so important,” he said. “The city can be consumed with negativity and violence. Some good, positive vibes can go a long way. It’s just good to show love to the kids.”