When visitors walk into the Urban Roots Community Garden Center, they are greeted with the pungent aromas of soil and fertilizer. Workers scurry about the unvarnished hardwood floor setting up gardening tools, feed bottles and seed packages in a bouquet of vibrant colors.
Board member-owner Leslie Duggleby chats with customers looking to get a jump on spring planting season.
Duggleby said the store is preparing for its busiest months of the year by expanding its hours and stocking its shelves.
“We start up full time again in April. This is when people come in to buy the supplies for seed starting,” she said. “They are starting to buy mulch and stuff too, but mostly they're focused on planting inside.”
Urban Roots, located at 428 Rhode Island St., is a co-operative organization and retail store aimed at providing a garden center for the City of Buffalo as well as being a presence in the community working towards improving the city through community gardens, educational workshops and collaborations with various other organizations and community leaders.
http://www.urbanroots.org/
The garden center offers instructional workshops in addition to the products it sells. Essex Street resident Kevin Bowen was in attendance at the Seed Starting Workshop on March 28 held by certified organic market gardener Richard Price. Bowen along with other Essex Street residents, participate in the annual Garden Walk of Buffalo, an annual event where private gardens are open for the public to view.
Creating community gardens and getting people involved in gardening not only beautifies a neighborhood and a city but it gets people out of their homes interacting with one another. These relationships are a characteristic of a strong community, said Anthony Armstrong, chair of Urban Roots.
"What happens when people start gardening is it creates a sense of community and gives other people a belief in their neighborhood again," he said.
A co-operative is a business or organization that is owned by citizens of a community who pay a one-time membership fee. In return the member owners receive a discount at the store each year based on what they spend at the store as well as the profit margin of the business, he said.
Urban Roots has a one time $100 membership fee. Upon payment the person becomes a member owner of Urban Roots for life.
“Co-operatives are a crucial part to the revitalization of Buffalo,” said Tim Bartlett, general manager of the Lexington Co-Operative. “Co-operatives allow for members of the community to have a stake in the businesses that surround them and that goes a long way when a businesses like the Lexington Co-Operative and Urban Roots are working to improve a city like Buffalo.”
The Lexington Co-Operative is a natural foods grocery store located at 807 Elmwood Ave. The co-op’s mission is to provide natural foods and education on nutrition to the Buffalo area.
The West Side has been improving in the past years due to the work of many individuals and organizations like the West Side Community Collaborative, a non-profit organization dedicated to the revitalization of the West Side of Buffalo, Armstrong said.
In 2004 an idea for a plant life co-operative began being tossed around by Blair Woods, a West Side community organizer and an advisory board member of Urban Roots. The idea for a co-op was aimed at improving Buffalo and more specifically the West Side by beautifying neighborhoods, he said.
That same year the collaborative won a $20,000 award from Local Initiatives Support Corporation for the work it did with crime prevention on 19th street on the West Side. The collaborative decided to dedicate the whole award to creating community gardens around the city, he said.
While working on these community gardens it became clear to those involved that the city needed a garden center, he said.
Many of the people and organizations working on creating community gardens on the West Side would have to drive a half hour into the suburbs just to get the materials needed to create the gardens, he said.
It was through this frustration and the belief by Woods, the collaborative and many others that gardening would greatly improve the West Side that Urban Roots was born, he said.
Since Urban Roots inception it has been helped by and worked closely with other co-operatives and organizations in the city.
Grassroots Gardens, an organization dedicated to beautification of vacant land, has partnered with Urban Roots to act as a liaison with the city to help locate vacant land to be used for gardens and to ensure that the land is properly insured, said Kirk Laubenstein, board president of Grassroots Gardens.
http://www.grassrootsgardens.org/
Urban Roots and Grassroots have also recently partnered in obtaining a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Justice. The $14,500 grant will be used by the organizations to create educational workshops on gardening, he said.
In April, Urban Roots provided the materials to the Buffalo Co-Operative Federal Credit Union, located at 816 Elmwood Ave., for a youth tree-planting event by the Lafayette Presbyterian Church on Elmwood Avenue, said Liz Shepard from the Buffalo Co-Operative members services.
The Lexington Co-Operative has worked closely with Urban Roots. The popular retail food store has collaborated with Urban Roots on educational classes, helped with the purchasing of plants and given advice on how to successfully run a co-operative, said Tim Bartlett, general manager of the Lexington Co-Operative.
http://lexington.coop/
"We have and will continue to help Urban Roots in any way possible," he said. "We are excited to have another co-operative in the area and we feel that Urban Roots has made great strides in improving the West Side and Buffalo as a whole."