Kresge Garden Constitution
The Kresge Garden:
The Kresge Garden is a space for the Kresge community, as well as the community encompassing the UCSC campus and the city of Santa Cruz. This multi-generational space is the oldest and largest student run garden on campus. The co-operative manner in which the students run the garden is unique to the space, and historically has had a good relationship with the students, teachers, and Kresge administration. This good relationship has resulted in a thriving green space. With a continuous harvest, it feeds the stomachs of the community as well as the spirit. Working as an outdoor classroom for undergraduates through classes, internships, and workshops the space demonstrates how to actively reduce food waste, build soil, store carbon, and encourage biodiversity in an agroecological food system. All of this together results in the garden being a segway through which ecosystems, both ecological and social, can flow into one another.
Mission Statement:
The Kresge Garden Cooperative's goal is to maintain and develop the space of the Kresge Garden. This includes the cultivation of the soil as well as the cultivation of the spirit. The creative permaculture practices that the cooperative applies value the interdependent and cyclical essence of nature. They do this through an autonomous and consensus based decision making process, with a horizontal power structure. Part of the cultivation of the garden rely on the passing down of knowledge through mentorship, a student based educational experience that reinforces and maintains the structure of the cooperative as well as the garden space.
The Kresge Garden: Past and Present
Kresge Garden Today:
The University of California at Santa Cruz’s plans for the upcoming build on the West Side of Campus, titled Core West Housing, is slated to build in the Porter Meadow and at the location of the Kresge Garden . They claim that alongside this development project they will “move” the garden (one cannot move a garden- one is destroyed and another built). The Kresge Garden co-op believes that this action will destroy the heart of Kresge that has been built through a long legacy of cultivation. The co-op also believes that the entire Core West Development, not just the “moving” of the garden, will have negative effects on not only the students but also the town of Santa Cruz and does not support this development.
This act is an example of how the privatization of the UC displaces important community spaces, removes resources for experiential learning in order to increase their profit, and ignores history (not only of the heritage of the garden but also of the indigenous peoples that see these unceded grounds as sacred). The co-op understands how this issue is interconnected with larger issues of colonialism, privatization, environmental degradation, and gentrification.
Understanding this issue in a larger context and in turn fighting for the land, the (fruit) trees, the habitat, and the larger community is now an immediate goal of the Kresge Garden Co-op, as it is in line with your main goal of the co-op, to maintain the space of the Kresge Garden. We hope that you will join us in our goal of maintaining the space of the Garden and the surrounding ecosystem.
The University of California at Santa Cruz’s plans for the upcoming build on the West Side of Campus, titled Core West Housing, is slated to build in the Porter Meadow and at the location of the Kresge Garden . They claim that alongside this development project they will “move” the garden (one cannot move a garden- one is destroyed and another built). The Kresge Garden co-op believes that this action will destroy the heart of Kresge that has been built through a long legacy of cultivation. The co-op also believes that the entire Core West Development, not just the “moving” of the garden, will have negative effects on not only the students but also the town of Santa Cruz and does not support this development.
This act is an example of how the privatization of the UC displaces important community spaces, removes resources for experiential learning in order to increase their profit, and ignores history (not only of the heritage of the garden but also of the indigenous peoples that see these unceded grounds as sacred). The co-op understands how this issue is interconnected with larger issues of colonialism, privatization, environmental degradation, and gentrification.
Understanding this issue in a larger context and in turn fighting for the land, the (fruit) trees, the habitat, and the larger community is now an immediate goal of the Kresge Garden Co-op, as it is in line with your main goal of the co-op, to maintain the space of the Kresge Garden. We hope that you will join us in our goal of maintaining the space of the Garden and the surrounding ecosystem.