Eden's
garden
Pisgah
Village in Highland Park reenvisions low-income senior housing,
reconnecting people to their food. And to one another.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/07/home/la-hm-pisgah-senior-housing-20100807
August 07,
2010|By Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times
Ten women gathered
around a few tables and at a sink one recent Friday afternoon to make
soup, rice with vegetables and barbecued fish for a community potluck
dinner.
That ordinary act
- making a meal, repeated monthly - represents a profound plan to
integrate food and shelter at Pisgah Village, a housing development in
Highland Park for low-income senior citizens that aims to preserve the
health and dignity of its residents.
Everywhere at
Pisgah, named for the hill from which Moses saw the promised land,
there are signs of that plan.
On Thursdays,
there's a produce market, priced to accommodate people with modest
means. Everyone seems conversant in notions such as pesticide-free and
organic. There are classes in nutrition and cooking.
And there's Pisgah
Village itself, a collection of rehabilitated bungalows and new
Craftsman-style buildings, 47 homes in all in a compound full of
gardens and a fountain. Once through the arched entrance, visitors see
fruit trees and other food planted everywhere.
"Everything
touches food, everything," said Alex Dorsey, the general manager
of Equitableroots, the L.A.-based program that runs the
market.
"We have a
responsibility to help our communities be nourished," said Channa
Grace, the executive director of Women Organizing Resources, Knowledge
and Services, or WORKS. The independent nonprofit organization has
developed more than 1,100 homes for people of modest means - those
who earn $23,790 to $47,580 for a family of four in 2009, or 30% to
60% of the area's median income.
The food programs
at Pisgah and at other WORKS projects are an effort to alleviate the
problems of getting fresh, nutritious food, Grace said, along the
lines of teaching people to fish rather than giving them
one.
Finis Yoakum, a
physician and faith healer who also became an early Pentecostal
leader, founded a religious compound more than a century ago off what
is now Avenue 60 in this northeast L.A. neighborhood. He called it
Pisgah, and his vision led him to open the property to outcasts and
the destitute. After his death in 1920, the houses and church on the
site were used by successive Christian groups.
In 2002, Richard
Kim, the son of a Pentecostal minister at the church, partnered with
WORKS to renovate the property. The adjacent Christ Faith Mission
church remains today.