My garden cleanup program hopes to address Kensington’s big problems by starting out small

During the peak of the pandemic, when trash pickup delays left the sidewalks along G Street littered with the debris of garbage bags that had burst at their seams, our weekly ritual began.

Armed with a list of problem spots, 3-foot-long Garbo Grabber trash-picking tongs, Husky 55-gallon contractor bags, and a smartphone camera to take before and after photos, some friends and I started making regular outings in the summer of 2020 to clean up our Kensington neighborhood.

Looking back, I guess you could say it was our way of putting something good into the world at a time when we all felt the pain of COVID-19, mourned the murder of George Floyd, and did our best to create humane, hopeful moments in our community, which has been branded variously as “Zombieland” and “The Badlands.”

When a grateful neighbor handed me $100 in cash after one cleanup and told me to use the money for the teens around here, an idea was born: What if that kind of cash was used to provide an attractive alternative to the fast money of the drug trade by paying Kensington teens to help clean their own streets and sidewalks?

The idea had legs, and — with additional donations from friends and some grant money — we launched Klean Kensington, a program in which teens turn abandoned lots into community gardens.

Projects abound: cleaning dumping corners, painting fences, converting wooden skids into raised garden beds, building compost bins, surveying neighbors about mechanisms to cope with grief, and brainstorming about the most efficient uses of outdoor space. Absent cash flow limitations — and given enough power tools and gardening trowels — I imagine the teens we work with could make over the whole neighborhood.

It’s a give and take: In the process, the teens are picking up new building skills, and I’m learning what it’s like to be a teenager growing up along G Street.

What are our young people processing when they see a line of users waiting for free samples extending down their block? Or drug paraphernalia and human excrement left in our gardens? What associations come to their minds in relation to the drug users? Drug sellers? Cops? Or, like me, idealistic outsiders who moved into the neighborhood?

The feelings are all mixed up and complex, especially if you have loved ones belonging to more than one of these groups at once. As my affection for them grows, so does my respect.

More than just about anything else, these teens are yearning for an opportunity — and they’re willing to put in the effort to see it through. All week long I get text messages and social media DMs with the same message: “Mr. Jeremy, can I work?”

Last Thanksgiving, we sat around the in-progress community garden’s in-progress fire pit, exchanging ghost stories and what-we’re-thankful-fors.

Sometime that evening, between mouthfuls of s’mores, I had a side conversation with one teen about Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the corporate greed that triggered the opioid epidemic, as well as other systemic influences, that coalesced to form the current conditions of the neighborhood.

The teen was astounded that upstream of the bleak sight that is our normal reality as neighbors, the machinations of unfathomably wealthy people were at play. I’m sure I used that as an occasion to reiterate my mantra to teens: Money won’t make you happy.

I hope the teens are getting it — that besides their decent hourly wage, they are feeling a sense of pride about their grassroots contribution to a different, hopeful story within the broader narratives about Kensington.

In the last several years, I’ve tried to actively listen to the diverse set of ideas that have been put forth to provide solutions for our neighborhood: harm reduction, safe injection sites, community policing, District Attorney Larry Krasner’s place-based gun violence strategy, efforts to fight homelessness.

None of them alone is able to cure what ails Kensington. And I hope that continued dialogue can help us move beyond polarization and toward the kind of collaborative problem-solving that eschews oversimplification.

All week long I get text messages and social media DMs with the same message: “Mr. Jeremy, can I work?”

That said, at the risk of sounding like I’m contradicting myself by oversimplifying things, there’s one keyword I would like to add to the conversation: grassroots.

While the overwhelming nature of Kensington’s problems necessitates big-picture conversations about big forces and big ideas, the conversation that is giving me the most hope surrounding our neighborhood is a plan that focuses on something small.

“Health, Wellness, and Healing Corridors,” which are championed by the New Kensington Community Development Corp., is the first phase of a multipronged idea to revitalize the neighborhood by focusing resources on existing residential and commercial corridors.

The aim is to empower neighbors, including young people like our junior block captain (Shout out to you, Lucy!), to form small pockets that can use their collective power to bring about change. That is the kind of idea I can get behind.

I’ve also enjoyed recently brainstorming with friends at another local nonprofit about ways to foster a circular economy here in the neighborhood, where less local money feeds our Amazon-techno-feudalist overlords and more of it returns to local value creation, people empowerment, and neighborhood renewal. I’d also like to see community churches return to the boots-on-the-ground ministries.

The complex, dynamic system that is Kensington short-circuits all of our brains. It’s just too much. But when I am sitting in a garden space with my 19-month-old, or working on a project with teens to carve out beauty in the neighborhood, I am hopeful. Let’s get back to empowering grassroots, neighbor-to-neighbor-level change, together.

Jeremy Chen is a block captain in Kensington. Besides collaborating with teens and neighbors on Klean Kensington, he is working on a doctorate at the Fuller Theological Seminary, studying the Orisha religion of Afro-Caribbean cultures. JeremyTChen@gmail.com