Ron Finley, the Gangster Gardener

Black History Month, day 24

The last thing that you would expect to find in South Los Angeles is a beautiful garden sprouting up through the concrete, coloring the urban landscape. Instead what comes to mind are gangs, drugs, liquor stores, abandoned buildings, and vacant lots. As part of an urban gardening movement, people are planting to transform neighborhoods and change their own lives in the process. Enter Ron Finley. Ron grew up in the South Central LA food desert and is familiar with the area’s lack of fresh produce.

In 2010, he set out to fix the problem. Ron planted vegetables in the curbside dirt strip next to his home and quietly, carefully, tenderly started a revolution. It was illegal to plant them on the land between the sidewalk and curb but he got the city of Los Angeles to change the law and end fines for vegetable gardens within the strip owned by the city.

In early 2013, Finley’s TED talk describes his progress as a “guerrilla gardener” and the dangers of food deserts, and the potential for his program to improve quality of life. He says, “If kids grow kale, kids eat kale; if they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes.”

A garden can change people’s lives. It can change the structure of a community … it’s about planting a seed and saying, ‘We can make a change.’ — Ron Finley

Finley is featured among the cast of the 2015 documentary, “Can You Dig This,” which premiered at the LA Film Festival and took home the Jury Award. The film follows the inspirational journeys of four unlikely gardeners, discovering what happens when they put their hands in the soil. “This is not a story of science and economics. This is a story of the human spirit, inspiring people everywhere to pick up their shovels and bring culture and community together and “plant some shit.”

Ron envisions a world where gardening is “gangsta,” where cool kids know their nutrition and where communities embrace the act of growing, knowing, and sharing the best of the earth’s fresh-grown food. (Ron Finley Project, The Ithaca Voice, Gathr Films, Wikipedia)