Christine Smith, Executive Director of Seedleaf, a community gardening organization in Lexington, KY.
Narrative from original post:
Christine: “How am I coping? I don’t think I have ever gardened this much. Besides Seedleaf work, which has not stopped because of Covid-19, I come home to garden even more. For this I am grateful because if I was locked inside all day by myself, I would crumble. Instead, by going outside to do work I enjoy and find meaningful– I think it has helped provide perspective and a steadying hand on my naturally anxious heart.
And Seedleaf? We haven’t been able to have volunteers this spring and this has led to Seedleaf staff doing almost all of the work that goes into getting gardens ready on our own. Physically, it is demanding but these gardens provide fresh produce to people who can’t have gardens of their own or who have access barriers to nutritionally rich food, so we do our best. This year we have two staff members to help get the gardens going but it is scary when I think about the future. We run exclusively on grants and donations from individuals and Covid-19 has been an economic disaster with unprecedented unemployment numbers. We can’t run on prayer and elbow grease alone but how do we ask individuals facing their own difficult financial futures for donations? It all makes my stomach lurch but then again, that’s when I go out to work and remind myself over and over to stay in the present and weed.” Though Christine didn’t include this in her narrative, Kurt and I would like folks to know you can support the work of Seedleaf by going to https://www.seedleaf.org/donations.
Audio Transcript
Hi, my name is Christine Smith. I’ve lived in Lexington since 2008 and the America I’d like to live in is an America where I have bigger worries than access to healthcare or whether I will survive a routine traffic stop encounter with a police officer, or whether going to a public gathering opens me up to potentially being injured in a mass shooting. I think that that, these worries are worries that I share with a lot of other people living in the United States and that it’s absurd in an industrialized country to even contemplate these things but I do. And they are … they are scary. And so that’s the America I’d like where these things get left behind.