ASUCI Garden

I have a confession. For the last eighteen months, I have been working my butt off with five other undergraduates to establish the first ever, completely student run, education based, on campus food garden at UC Irvine.

Eighteen months ago, I halfheartedly proposed a new campaign to the Real Food Challenge at UCI - a student organization dedicated to increasing the procurement of environmentally friendly, socially responsible and economically viable food on campus through advocacy and education projects. The idea was simple: lets start a student run food garden that operates more like an extended classroom than a farm. The garden space would provide food education through volunteering opportunities, workshops and extension of university curriculum.

Alexandra Nagy - a good friend and fellow co-president of RFC@UCI, had suggested the same idea a few months before. So, we decided one day to walk into the office of the Director of Environmental and Campus Planning at UCI, and asked for a garden. He asked the most obvious question imaginable: how big do you want it to be? uh...well...we were really unprepared, and it was about at this point when I realized that this was going to be a longer project than I anticipated.

A group of five undergraduates began meeting weekly, and in no time, we had the support of hundreds of students, and several key faculty and administrators. In the Fall of last year, the Scholarship Opportunities Office helped me identify appropriate fellowships for which to apply, and then continued to provide essential feedback throughout the application process. In the end, I was selected as an alternate to the Strauss Fellowship Foundation.

Concurrent to the Strauss application process, we also applied for a grant from UCI's very own TGIF - the Green Initiative Fund, from whom we were granted over $30,000! I'm glad that I was able to use some funds from TGIF - which is student funded - to provide students with a new resource.

Finding land for the garden was also a lengthy bureaucratic nightmare worth noting - nearly all of the land at UCI has been planned for development, through the Long Term Development Plan established decades ago. In the beginning of September, we finally were able to settled on a quarter-acre plot of land in Arroyo Vista. This would not have been possible without the support from key administrators, including Vice Chancellor Dan Dooros and Director of the Student Center, and our advisor: Stacey Murren.

This weekend we are celebrating the groundbreaking of the garden. We plan to build nearly 50 raised beds in a day. We'll have free food, free tshirts, and plenty of work to do - all day! There will be painting, eating, planting, building and sweat. We expect upwards of 500 students to attend the event. I hope you can make it - more information is at this link.

I am graduating in the Spring, with a BS in Physics. It is heartwarming to see the campaign that I have worked diligently on for 18 months come to fruition, and I am overjoyed that I can leave behind a legacy at UCI and provide new opportunities to fellow students. Before June, I will help strengthen the foundation of the garden and do my best to guarantee its future success.

I must confess that this project is my love child - a bastard campaign that quickly grew beyond my expectations and took a lot of time from my academics and other interests. I've come to peace with this imbalance. Undertaking this project has only been rewarding an experience, and one from which I've learned more than I would have from any classroom. I encourage anyone with ambitious ideas to pursue them, for the sake of the experience. I am fully convinced that UC Irvine has more opportunities for undergraduates to pursue more cocurricular and extracurricular activities than even the most prestigious universities.

The garden would not have been possible without the encouragement and invaluable help of the following entities and people: The Scholarship Opportunities Office Counselors; ASUCI; TGIF; The Strauss Fellowship; Kevin Schlunegger; Megan Braun, Dan Dooros, Richard Demerjian; Sitara Nayudu; Logan Frick. Thanks to Linda Huang for designing our awesome UCI logo. The garden would have been downright impossible without the Anteater Garden Initiative: Alexandra Nagy, Alexandre Colavin, Lauren Hopfenbeck, Steve Han, David Lee, Sandy Chirico, Alexis Kim and the Real Food Challenge at UCI.

You can find more information about our garden at the ASUCI website. I also invite you to check out our original, 18 page proposal to student affairs.

I'll update this post soon with photos, timelapses, etc. from the groundbreaking ... in 48 hours!