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Creating community through a public workday

When I first joined my neighborhood community garden, I didn’t know much of anything about plants or composting or carpentry, but through a combination of factors, I ended up in the role of facilitating workdays. I learned that someone who helps to facilitate a workday isn’t necessarily a person who knows the most, has been there the longest, or has any kind of formal role or authority. They are someone who decides to show up consistently on a particular day, lets other people know that it’s happening, and invites them to join in.

Below are some reflections and learnings from one season of facilitating a twice-monthly public workday at Green Oasis & Gilbert’s Community Garden. I wanted to share what we’ve been doing, what worked, and what didn’t, for those interested in stepping into the role at their garden. And I think this journey suggests a larger point — that in the unique and somewhat utopian project of community gardening, figuring out how we should work together is just as or even more important than what work gets done. And it may need quite a bit of experimenting and evolving, but it’s the process that creates the community in “community gardening.”

A public workday

A public workday is a regularly occurring time where anyone can show up and participate in garden work. They are different from one-off events for completing occasional tasks or for hosting specific groups of visitors, and from workdays that are only open to current or prospective members.

Some places that host regular public workdays:

Although they are more common in gardens without a membership structure, gardens that do have membership structure can also benefit from having a public workday.

Many hands make light work. If you have a shortage of willing and able members needed to take on big, labor-intensive tasks, it can make sense to look outside the existing membership. Committing to a regular cadence helps to develop an attendance of regulars. You don’t have to start from scratch each time to advertise a workday, and returning attendees can build up skills and knowledge. People who notice your workday and want to collaborate can start reaching out to you instead of vice versa. A workday can be a really good first step for prospective members to get to know the garden, the work, and the people. No orientation based on slideshows or infodumps can substitute for actual experience. Often, new joiners are directed to do things like fill out forms, join internal communications, or sign bylaws before they have had the chance to truly experience the community and the kind of work they will participate in, and figure out if they are interested. This can result in frustrations about new joiners who are very enthusiastic but disappear after effort has been put into orienting them, or complaints about dues-paying members who are there for the “wrong reasons” and don’t actually want to do the work. Fundamentally, in a community garden, decisions are made by those who do the work: what color a table should be painted, how to arrange some paving stones in a walkway, whether a plant should stay or be weeded. A public workday gives the wider community a way to create something of their own in the garden and a stake in maintaining it. If the barrier to entry for membership is very high, people might not feel invited into the garden, but a public workday is much more accessible. Adding a public workday doesn’t have to be lots of extra work if there is already a members-only workday that could be converted to or promoted as open to everyone.

Our garden

Green Oasis has a long-standing monthly public workday on the first Sunday of every month right after our garden meeting. It was largely the project of one person who also organized volunteer workdays at two other gardens in the neighborhood.

We also have committees that schedule their own workdays. The only committee that has a regularly scheduled workday is the gardening committee, which has a weekly workday on Wednesday mornings. All other committees, such as composting and infrastructure, schedule ad hoc workdays when lots of hands are needed for a big task, but otherwise people largely work alone or in small groups. New joiners in different committees encounter variable experiences as to how active or collaborative that committee is.

We wanted to have a shared and regular time where we could be present and available for both the public and garden members to work collaboratively.

To that end, we added a workday on the third Sunday of the month, also after a regularly scheduled garden meeting. We had two members consistently organize these workdays, and around five other members were sometimes present. Last season, we were able to make improvements and get better at facilitating them, especially to accommodate large organized institutional groups. But as we developed a stronger sense of intention around the purpose and values of our workday, we also came up with things we would like to do differently next season.

Creating a positive atmosphere as workday facilitators

Throughout the season we made a number of changes to make our workday more inviting, which were influenced by visits to other public workdays and volunteer-run organizations, as well as by reading the book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker.

Tips for managing big groups

We quickly found that the bulk of attendance at our workdays were organized groups, primarily high school student Key Clubs traveling from other boroughs. The student leaders themselves contacted us and scheduled their group. Some program administrators of universities and corporations looking for volunteer activities also reached out. Since we have a very large garden (half an acre), these organized groups were extremely helpful in completing big tasks, such as distributing mulch and weeding bamboo. Several student groups ended up returning to the garden throughout the season. The high school student volunteers were often extremely diligent and enthusiastic, staying late to finish or improve their work (those who administrators scheduled were less engaged).

However, managing an organized group is a big task in itself. We learned a few things to make it easier for a small number of garden members to handle a large number of visitors:

In accordance with the values of our garden, in order to encourage autonomy and reduce hierarchy, we gave choices for tasks whenever possible, asked people about their interests / motivations while they were working, and asked volunteers to teach each other and self-organize their work. We avoided giving direct answers to questions when possible, instead giving prompts to guide the person in figuring it out themselves. It was also important to us for workday facilitators to spend time working side by side with the volunteers, doing the same task if possible.

How and why we are trying smaller workdays for the future

Organized groups represented a large proportion of the sheer number of attendees each workday, taking attention away from those who came as individuals and creating a large ratio of volunteers to garden members. Although we appreciated being able to host organized groups of volunteers and introduce them to the garden, we also found that their presence made it difficult to create the workday experience we wanted for both the volunteers and ourselves.

For our garden culture, which really values individual initiative and DIY, that means bringing people into our way of getting things done. Having large groups inevitably meant a lot of telling people what to do because of time and attention constraints, which made it hard for volunteers to experience the flat hierarchy, amateur experimentation, and sense of autonomy that comes with being part of our garden.

With a higher ratio of experienced members to new volunteers, we would be able to ask participants what they are most interested in learning and support them in designing a task, such as raised bed repairs for those interested in DIY, or invasive species removal for those interested in plants. We could also give people more space for independent problem-solving while still providing support and advice, as well as teach more involved skills like using power tools.

This more personalized approach would better facilitate returning volunteers increasing their skills, responsibilities, independence, and overall involvement at the garden over time, rather than repeating similar simplistic tasks. Also, volunteers would be more able to connect on an individual level with garden members, allowing them to become familiar with the garden culture and the personalities at the garden.

Being able to better support returning volunteers fits with our goal of the public workday becoming a source of new garden members. Last season, we did grow our newsletter to 20 non-members, we had two new members join through the workday (vs. other means), and we had a handful of returning volunteers. We found that these tended to be people who arrived as individuals, not as part of organized volunteer groups. While those organized volunteer groups did return, they weren’t necessarily interested in becoming more deeply involved at the garden, preferring to travel to many different volunteer opportunities with their group.

We would also like the workday to be a context where current garden members can meet and work together. The garden has a bunch of separate committees that each schedules their own workdays, and time after the garden meeting can serve as a casual space for everyone to come together. However, we found that the busy atmosphere of having large numbers of volunteers every workday sometimes deterred garden members from relaxing at the garden or pursuing their own projects during the workday, and members would leave quickly after the garden meeting was over. Also, for those members participating in the workday, the need to split up to facilitate groups of volunteers doing different tasks meant that garden members weren’t able to collaborate with one another and build relationships with each other.

This season, the changes we are making include a pause on accepting organized groups and signing volunteer forms. We will potentially encourage first-time volunteers to attend the workday on the first Sunday, so that other workdays can be more geared toward more experienced volunteers and members to pursue projects or learn about the garden. We will also try to involve more garden members in the workday such as by encouraging committees to schedule their workdays during the public workday, or requesting their help in being workday facilitators.

Finally, we will try to encourage tasks and projects that don’t aim to get necessary labor done for the garden, but are more open-ended, interest-based, or educational. Rather than having a set task list, we could ask volunteers themselves to observe the garden’s needs or activities they would be interested in. We could also spend more time simply observing the plants and animals around us. Overall, we hope to have a more collaborative, personal, and slower-paced workday involving both members and new volunteers.

Our workday values

As a community garden, we have the opportunity to be an alternative space that works differently from a park, nonprofit, or corporate workplace. Remembering that the garden is not any of those things helps us to focus on bringing to light what makes community gardens special, as well as maintain the expectation that the garden will operate with different — and potentially unfamiliar — rules and norms. For example, our garden is a place where people can have direct stewardship over the land, making their own decisions and shaping the space with their own hands. Gardeners can also determine and enact the values of their own communities. We want our workday to emphasize this opportunity rather than trying to maximize the amount of work done (e.g. volumes of compost processed), be efficient, or optimize metrics (biodiversity, numbers of participants).

In thinking carefully about how we want to organize our workdays and then bringing it to life, we are demonstrating how much we are capable of as a bunch of neighbors coming together. In acclimating people to this experience in their daily lives, a garden can be a model and inspiration for finding passion, joy, freedom, and community in our work, and expand our imagination for what the world can look like outside the garden gates.