HOW IT STARTED

The Growing Resistance campaign started out of the Brattleboro Community's growing interest in gardening stemming from the impacts of COVID-19. Brattleboro is not alone in that urge, we see it happening all over the world, and historically, people often pursue growing their own food during major crises.

Currently, our world is experiencing an unprecedented moment due to the COVID pandemic. It has made us re-examine our supply chains and how we get our food. It’s a time of increased anxiety and food insecurity, and a time when mental health and wellness are challenged by new barriers to connecting with each other and the outside world. We all agree that gardening can help, even if just a little bit.

In Brattleboro there are many organizations working to strengthen our local food system in a variety of ways. They all share a common interest in food security and sovereignty, wellness, nutrition, community empowerment and resilience. At a time when resources are stretched extremely thin, many of these organizations gathered on a call to consider how their existing assets could be aligned and presented in a new way to support gardening in a new way during this time.

This call to organize was inspired by an articles entitled Bring Back ‘Victory Gardens’ by Roger Allbee and The Time is Now for Vermont Victory Gardens by UVM Extension's Gordon Clark. This, combined with the apparent high interest in gardening, was the seed for launching the “Growing Resilience” campaign as a way to respond and help carry our community through unique challenges with a sense of self-reliance, health, food security, and solidarity.

In time, Brooks Memorial Library stepped forward to lead the creation of a website and outreach infrastructure. Subsequently, the Town of Brattleboro's Sustainability Coordinator facilitated the formation of the organizing group (co-signers of this article) and gathered a catalog of community gardening resources through the Growing Resilience story frame.

We are all collaborating to tell this story together and create opportunities for Brattleboro to feel connected, both to this place and each other, through our relationships to food and growing. There's no other place we would rather be Growing Resilience.