Tierra Viva garden, located in The Village Student Housing B Quad, was formerly used by the Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA). However, in recent years, this garden space has been co-opted by Alexie Leauthaud and her research team to ignite a new community space for BIPOC students on campus, while also investigating the feasibility of rainwater tanks and compost systems in home gardens.Â
Seed Spoon Science is a program that connects Latinx STEM students to local families with young children, so that the students can engage the children in hands-on science experiments in their own backyard garden. This program utilizes Tierra Viva as a space to grow their connections with the community. Every month, there are community workdays which invite the families into the garden space to work alongside their student partner. This gives the family and children a chance to explore a space where research experiments are taking place at a university level, allowing them to visualize how their own science experiments can transform into research one day.
The Environmental Studies Garden Internship utilizes Tierra Viva as a learning space to put their academic studies into action. Designed to have students working in the garden 6 hours a week, this allows students to take cooperative responsibility for the maintenance and design of the garden. By exploring sustainable gardening systems and histories of agriculture, the goal is to have the students collaborate on a way to run the garden that benefits the students as well as the local ecosystem. This internship began in Spring 2024, and has been put on pause as we move into a new phase of our garden. The goal is to continue this internship in Spring 2025.
The Village community, in which the garden is deeply embedded, plays a pivotal role in the upkeep and maintenance of Tierra Viva. Through community events, students can use the plants grown in the garden to create meals, tea, and art, while fostering a deeper sense of community with their neighbors.