Paradise Garden

I am long overdue in writing this story. My dear friend and mentor, Ms. Mary Peery, passed away in 2017 at the age of 91. I still miss her all the time.

I wish I had captured the stories that she would share about growing up in Mississippi and her work as the only woman supervisor in a steel mill in Chicago. Ms. Peery loved living in the Austin neighborhood in westside Chicago. She shared often the story of how the Austin Green Team got its start. Over thirty years ago, she was very concerned about a vacant house next to her home. She advocated for years to have it torn down. When a young girl was raped on the property, she had had enough.

The City demolished the building and agreed to dedicate the land as a community garden. Ms. Peery lovingly turned that piece of land into the Paradise Garden. She then formed the Austin Green Team, and for over thirty years, they have nurtured community gardens throughout the Austin neighborhood.

Ms. Peery and I met at a community meeting and I invited her to an intergenerational peace circle. Here she shared her story about the gardens and her dream of engaging youth in the community to work with them. Two young men, Larry and Deshaun, were motivated by her story to join in and do what they could to help out.

Larry and Deshaun wrote a grant for the AARP Foundation Mentor Up program and went to Washington D.C. to learn how to develop and lead an intergenerational program in their community.

The youth and older adult teams worked together in community gardens for over three years. There was also a spring break youth conference organized by Austin Coming Together to help young people skill up for summer jobs in which they dug into work in the gardens.

In addition, to build the capacity of the community to include intergenerational strategies into their efforts, people of all generations went through a training sponsored by Dominican University School of Social Work and Temple University Center for Intergenerational Learning.

They created an effort called “Austin Peacebuilders” which hosted peace circles and other community events in partnership with Austin Coming Together to help address the root issues that can lead to violence.

The relationships that were nourished from this work led to a transformation in how young people saw their role in their community, as leaders of community change, in partnership with people from other generations.