The B Street Permaculture Project
Outreach and Education
The B-Street Permaculture Project is already an active site with students, faculty, and community members working together to create an educational resource center that promotes awareness of and action towards incorporating sustainable practices into individual, institutional and civic operations. The site's mission is based on the permaculture principles of care for the earth, care for the people, and fair share of resources, as applied through systems thinking design methods. Systems thinking requires a broad interdisciplinary understanding of cultural and environmental structures; connecting this project to the study of the liberal arts at Pacific University allows students and faculty from every discipline to contribute and combine their efforts in a synergistic way. In part, the site's outreach and education efforts promote civic activity related to changing our reliance on industrialized international food distribution systems to that of local small farm suppliers and individual gardening efforts. These changes in how we obtain our food will strengthen local economies, improve nutritional outcomes, and redistribute social imbalances across the urban/rural divide.
The B-street project as a site for service learning is:
- Interdisciplinary – students from every discipline can have a meaningful role in helping to develop this educational community resource.
- Intergenerational – K-12 and higher education students, their faculty, and community members are all working together to develop the site and achieve its associated objectives.
- Interconnected – group projects at the site connect multiple community organizations who work together in partnership to achieve common goals. Project Partners are: the Environmental Studies Department and Humanitarian Center at Pacific University, Oregon Campus Compact through Learn and Serve America, Adelante Mujeres, I Have a Dream Foundation, Oregon Tilth, Metro, City of Forest Grove, Forest Grove Charter School (K-12), and the Farmers Market and Food-Co-op initiatives. In addition, the project seeks to foster direct connections between individual and institutional food buyers and local food producers.
The B Street Demonstration Farm is affiliated with the Environmental Studies Program at Pacific University (provides funding for tools, student volunteers, interns), the Pacific University Humanitarian Center (provides service learning and work-study students, and 2 Americorps volunteers), the Oregon Campus Compact (provides funding for training, tools, infrastructure), Metro (site owner), Clean Water Services (plant material, technical advice, and staff assistance), Oregon Tilth (publicity, organic farming contacts and resources), I Have a Dream Foundation (community service volunteers) and Adelantes Mujeres (member volunteers - Adelante Mujeres, is an organization dedicated to the holistic education and empowerment of low-income Latina women and their families and to helping these families attain economic security through the development of small businesses). The B-Street Site provides acreage and education on environmentally sensitive farming techniques (including water usage) to this organization for use as a business incubator for members wishing to develop organic market farms. The overall needs of our organization stem from our desire to connect with a variety of people and organizations with different expertise in order to initiate programs on the property that will result in community building, research, and demonstration of environmentally sensitive techniques.
The B Street Demonstration Farm is bordered on two sides by Gales Creek. Some of our members (Pacific University faculty) are working with Clean Water Services to plant native vegetation along the creek as part of their Healthy Streams Plan in order to provide cleaner, cooler water, better flood management, and fish and wildlife habitat. Oregon Campus Compact supports our project as a site for service learning and Oregon Tilth shares our commitment to community outreach and education in relation to healthy, sustainable and socially just food systems.