The 50-year-old Norton & Stonehurst Community Garden in Bowdoin-Geneva has received a new lease on life. The space was recently renovated through the efforts of members of the Bowdoin Street Health Center, including Marcus Lewis, its violence intervention and prevention coordinator, and Peter McKinnon, its facilities manager, and last week, the team celebrated the new look with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the renovated garden.

The project was funded by a three-year $25,000 Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation (BCJI) grant awarded by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to the Boston Public Health Commission for projects that reduce crime while spurring community engagement and neighborhood revitalization.

Lewis applied for the grant on behalf of the health center in October 2017, and the funds were approved that same year. After a community process to determine where residents wanted to see the grant money allocated, the final plan was submitted to the DOJ for approval, where it stalled during the presidential election and transition.

Despite the delay, “BSHC was finally able to work with the community to get the funds out,” said Alberte Altine-Gibson, BSHC manager of community health.”

Both Altine-Gibson and Lewis are excited at seeing the impact of the renovated garden on the Bowdoin and Geneva communities.

“It’s been around since the early ‘70s, with residents who are still participating,” said Lewis. “So, there’s a generation of residents who have originally been participating and now new residents are participating.”

He noted that the renovation will “bring them together as a community, bring programming around healthy food access, gardening, and community engagement, and make the garden last longer. Now there’s another 50 years’ worth of wealth in that community space that’s able to be shared with new residents and existing residents.”

Lewis said they’re planning activities for the garden and learning exercises. “We also have a new plot dedicated to peace,” he added. “That’s for everyone in the community to reflect. We’re also going to change it as the seasons go by. So, we’ll have a Halloween theme, a Thanksgiving theme, a Christmas theme, and really just engage the residents as we look at this spot as a gem in our community. There’s a lot of hidden gems in Dorchester, especially in the Bowdoin and Geneva areas.”

Altine-Gibson pointed to BSHC’s longstanding partnership with the resident-founded garden. “The health center engaged in this as another way to support the community,” she said.

“We were part of the trustees. One of our staff workers, Jen French, would attend the meetings in the evening because it was very difficult for some of the residents to do that. They decided to split the work, so that she would help with some of the administrative pieces, and then the community residents would take care of some of the aspects within the garden, ensuring that it was clean and everything was happening the way it was supposed to—things of that nature. And that’s how the health center got involved.”

She also emphasized the many roles that BSHC plays in the Bowdoin and Geneva neighborhood. In addition to standard medical care, BSHC offers programming around food access, a wellness center for physical activity, online classes, help accessing housing and enrolling in health insurance, and more. It’s also a member of the Neighborhood Trauma Team Network through the Boston Public Health Commission. During the pandemic, BSHC quickly pivoted, setting up a Covid-19 testing site in April of 2020 that has performed around 32,000 tests to date.

“As violence intervention and prevention a health center, we never closed during the pandemic. We always had our doors open,” Altine-Gibson said. “Everyone was pitching in and doing a variety of different work. We kept the mission going.” Key to that mission were Lewis’s efforts to prevent violence, in part through the renovation of the Norton & Stonehurst Community Garden.

“The work of VIP [violence intervention and prevention] is a public-health approach to violence,” Altine-Gibson said. “It’s not the residents’ issue. It’s not a police issue. It’s not the health center’s issue. It’s everyone’s issue, and the more we’re able to get everyone to the table to come up with some solutions the easier it will be.

“We all have a voice. We all have the ability to push for and make changes. We are pushing for our community to be right there at the helm. Sometimes it doesn’t look like what a health center would do, but really, that’s what it’s about. It’s that multi-tiered group coming together to make effective changes.”

Lewis had that very goal in mind when he submitted the federal grant proposal. Renovating the community garden made sense, he said, “given what we were doing for this area around safety through environmental design—really taking a look at the area and how we can improve it and build more safety and inclusion for the community through natural design and activities, communications with the residents, participation from the residents, and a partnership with our community police offices.”

“How do we work against violence together?” Lewis asked. “It takes a village. Our community has very strong individuals, so it’s just finding where can we build the connections, so residents aren’t only looking at each other [in terms of] what part of the country they’re from, or what nationality—we’re really getting to know a neighbor as ‘Ms. Jen, Ms. Susan, Mr. Lewis,’ and building that community, that understanding.”