[Lapg] Eden's garden LA Pisgah Village in Highland Park reenvisions low-income senior housing, reconnecting people to their food. And to one another

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

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.
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