Increasing Community Resilience with the Paradise Parking Plots Community Gardens
Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr
Contributions from our annual GiveBIG fundraising campaign are being used to fund collaborations with community-based organizations and non-profits that work to strengthen local climate resilience. One such organization is World Relief Seattle, and we are proud to announce our partnership on their Paradise Parking Plots Community Garden project in Kent, Washington.
The Paradise Parking Plots Community Garden is designed to “improve food access, build community, and foster economic independence” among immigrant and refugee communities. Since launching in 2016, the project transformed an underused parking lot into a verdant grid of garden plots in under two years. Today, these garden spaces are available for families to grow culturally important foods, providing both sustainable access to healthy produce and a hub for building community through environmental stewardship. The community garden, once a deteriorating and little-used parcel of pavement, is now a busy green space that brings people together and builds resilience by trading impermeable pavement for rich soils. Soils reduce local flooding by soaking up rainfall rather than sending it away as pavement does, and the extensive plant life within the garden creates a cool refuge that is a welcome contrast to the heat radiated by concrete on hot summer days.
The community garden contains a growing number of green infrastructure features, including rain gardens and a rainwater collection system. These features reduce stormwater runoff by capturing it for reuse as irrigation water, and they also provide other benefits. For example, while rain gardens and a bioswale manage excess rainfall, they also provide important habitat for pollinators—a welcome benefit in the vegetable gardens. By capturing and slowing the rate of runoff, these installations also help reduce localized flooding and support the City of Kent’s restoration efforts in the Mill Creek watershed.
Earth Economics is supporting the project by measuring the economic value of the ecosystem services—water storage, water purification, flood reduction, habitat provision, and more—provided by the Paradise Parking Plots. This analysis will allow World Relief to clearly demonstrate to potential partners and funders the ways in which a community benefits from investments in similar projects, and will allow them to leverage outside funding to expand the current project and extend their model of community-building through environmental stewardship to other sites. As our work has consistently shown, shining a bright light on the multiple benefits that result from trading pavement for green space catalyzes investments that support healthy ecosystems and resilient communities.
Everyone at Earth Economics is deeply grateful for our donors who make collaborations like this possible. In 2022, we will continue providing our assistance—supported entirely by your charitable contributions—to other community-based non-profits like World Relief Seattle. We depend on donors like you so that we can support organizations that rely on us as they work to strengthen climate resilience in their communities. Our analyses are designed to raise awareness of the benefits of green infrastructure, build local support for these projects, and provide economic evidence that can help secure necessary funding. We invite you to make a year-end contribution and help us continue to work towards a future where healthy ecosystems, robust economies, and vibrant, resilient communities all thrive together.
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