Cubuy-Lomas Community Run Food Production Garden
Project Sponsor: Id Shaliah and Javier Valedon
Team Members: Grace Coughlin, Luca Garofalo, Matt Morvillo, Eloisa Salcedo-Marx
Project Advisors: Martin Cobian, Scott Jiusto
Project Files:
Abstract:
In Puerto Rico, where natural and man-made disasters are common and jobs are scarce, community support and opportunities are vital. This project worked with the communities of Cubuy and Lomas in Canóvanas through a partnership with Id Shaliah, a grassroots nonprofit. Working with the Cubuy-Lomas Community Center, we helped develop a small community garden and social space. The initiative supports residents struggling with unemployment or health issues by offering them a chance to grow crops and contribute to the center. This garden promotes resilience, self-sufficiency, and solidarity—offering a sustainable model of hope and empowerment in the face of adversity.
Problem Statement and Project Mission
Located a half hour drive from the San Juan Metropolitan area, Cubuy and Lomas are small, rural barrios (parishes) in the municipality of Canóvanas on the mountainous outskirts of El Yunque National Forest. There are about 10,000 people living in the Cubuy and Lomas barrios. The mountainous terrain has made this region particularly vulnerable to severe weather events that can isolate households from much needed resources and limit economic opportunities.
Id Shaliah is a small, volunteer-based non-profit organization that was established in early 2020 to address the needs of the Cubuy and Lomas communities that emerged during the pandemic. The ID Shaliah center officially opened in 2024 and offers support in many ways, including food and hot meals to residents, a community thrift shop, medical supplies and doctors visits to bed-ridden residents.
With the growth in participation at the community center, Id Shaliah looks for more ways to support the community. The purpose of our project was to develop and begin implementing a food garden by working with local volunteers and community center participants. This was done through rigorous research on existing community gardens and possible agroecology systems, the development of multiple plans and models, and a variety of exercises with volunteers to determine the most beneficial use of the space. Along with the construction of the garden, the team created guides to help the community continue the maintenance and further development of the garden, including operational and management plans, marketing plans, budgets, and information on how to replicate the project.
Background
In Puerto Rico, a meal is never guaranteed. For the past two centuries, the prevalence of agriculture in Puerto Rico has vastly declined from being one of its main economic sectors to one of its least developed productive sectors, leading to a fragile food system that leaves residents heavily reliant on imported food. Most low-income populations in the country use food stamps to purchase their food in local supermarkets and small convenience stores. Approximately 85% Puerto Rico’s food is imported, much of it consisting of cheap, highly processed products high in sugar, salt and preservatives. This type of food is often the most accessible to low-income households, as it dominates supermarkets and convenience stores – precisely where food stamps are accepted (Ginzburg 2021). This makes Puerto Rico’s food system insecure for two main reasons: because of its dependency on imported goods which could easily be disrupted by natural and man-made disasters, and because of the imported food being easily accessible yet generally unhealthy and a driver of diet related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes (Correa-Matos et al., 2020). This especially becomes an issue in disaster relief scenarios, when 41% of the USDA food provisions is made up of snacks and sweets (Colon-Ramos et al., 2019). However, by reducing their dependence on imports and increasing access to culturally appropriate and nutritious foods, community centered agroecological farming can offer ways to circumvent Puerto Rico’s food insecurity.
An alternative in this regard are community gardens. These have been known to serve as a resource for food security, social engagement, and community resilience. They help balance urban interests with sustainable land use, preserving green spaces. Beyond their main purpose of producing food, community gardens can have numerous other benefits. Depending on leadership, many create opportunities for social interaction through different recreational activities and events and may even contribute to increasing the physical activity of members of the community. In Puerto Rico, community gardens have been created as a direct response to food insecurity and have played an essential role in improving economic struggles due to environmental disasters, promoting local food sovereignty and strengthening social networks (Felix, G., & Holt-Giménez, E., 2017). After the damage of Hurricane Maria, grassroots movements, and local organizations in Puerto Rico led to the rise of community gardens as a method for social justice, and food sovereignty. The gardens were initially established to promote cultural heritage and sustainability, but eventually they evolved into more crucial support systems to rely on post-disaster. Even when food production is not the center of the community gardening spaces, they are used as hubs of social support and communication, as is the case in the Cubuy-Lomas Community Center.
The Cubuy-Lomas Community Center was founded in 2021 by Javier Valédon along with his non-profit organization, Id Shaliah, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining hub for residents. The center repurposed an abandoned elementary school between the Cubuy and Lomas neighborhoods, featuring a cafeteria, pharmacy, medical clinic, library, and computer lab. It currently serves as a resource hub offering clean water, healthy food options, and educational programs. Javier envisions the center as a space for building unity and long-term community support in the face of challenges.
The approach decided on to accomplish this was the implementation of a community food garden that would integrate key principles of community development including creating social connections, promoting food sovereignty, and offering work opportunities for participants. Additionally, the garden is to serve as an educational space for helping residents develop skills in growing their own food. Through resource-sharing, education, and fresh-produce, the community garden project seeks to reduce reliance on imported food, improve daily nutrition, and strengthen self-sustainability of the Lomas-Cubuy Community. Operationally, the garden will function by allowing each volunteer an area in the garden to grow quick-return crops that they can sell in local markets or bring home to feed themselves and their families. The goal is to bring the currently distant and struggling community together to support each other.
Goal, Objectives, & Methods
The aim of the project was to implement a community garden that functioned as a method of community building and self-sustainable food production. Our team came up with three objectives surrounding the needs of the community to help us reach this goal:
- Determine how to optimize the production and vocational benefits of the garden based on the needs of the community.
- Assess the gardening space to develop construction plans and gather community feedback on various layouts to create an optimal garden for community benefits.
- Develop a practical how-to guide designed to support Id Shaliah and other organizations and non-profits in planning, developing, and maintaining a community garden.
- Constructing the raised bed and in-ground garden based on community needs and feedback.
Objective 1: Optimizing Vocational and Production Needs
The first objective – to determine the optimal function of the garden based on the needs of the community – is the essential first step of bringing a community garden to life. A wide variety of community and food gardens exist, and each has their own purpose, design, and management system. To ensure that the community will benefit from the garden we created, we first had to assess the situation and determine every way that the garden could possibly help the community. This was done by immersing ourselves in the community and utilizing participant observation. Through participant observation, we perform what is called “hanging out” which entails spending time with the members of the community and becoming part of the community ourselves. This could include sitting and having lunch with the locals, organizing donation boxes and unloading trucks, offering a helping hand around the community center, and overall becoming a friendly face that locals feel comfortable being around. In doing so, we learned more about the members who frequent the community center, their needs, wants, and how they could use the garden. This gave us a better understanding of how we should begin our planning and next steps for the garden area.
Objective 2: Community Feedback and Garden Design
Our second objective was vital in creating the community garden that will most optimally benefit the community’s needs. Assessing the gardening space included taking dimensions of the physical space, noting surrounding features of the garden space like potential drainage, irrigation methods, and sunlight exposure, and looking around the community center for recyclable materials to use during construction. Dimensioning the physical space includes sketching the space with the dimensions and any surrounding features that we had to work around, as well as sketching preliminary ideas for the final form of the garden. Through the use of mapping activities conducted with available members of the community, our team was able to determine an optimal layout for an in-ground garden and a raised-bed space to be implemented into the community center. The mapping activities were conducted with members of the community who we previously introduced ourselves to and had expressed interest in helping begin and maintain the garden. During casual sit-down sessions, we first explained our preliminary thoughts about the in-ground and raised bed gardens before opening the floor to hear feedback from the community members, allowing them to drive conversation surrounding the layout of the gardens. Through these community mapping activities, we were able to create in-ground and raised bed garden layouts that would best support the community.
Objective 3: Creating a How-To Guide for Community Garden Implementation
Another objective of this project was to develop a practical how-to guide for individuals and organizations seeking to establish a community garden. The how-to guide is grounded in research on common community gardening strategies. We combined this information with personal direct experiences by documenting the process of creating a garden space, including photographs, videos, sketches, and physical models that served to illustrate each stage of development. The narrative reflections helped to contextualize the challenges and milestones encountered throughout the project, bringing in specific information that helped us move forward in the community gardening process specifically at the Cubuy-Lomas community center. Throughout the guide, we included tools that could be used for community garden projects like ours, providing examples of a garden maintenance sheet, tools and materials list and budget, and community involvement guidance tools like a volunteer interest form and community participant schedule. Each of these features will help the Cubuy-Lomas community center and similar groups plan, launch, and manage a community garden centered around their community’s needs.
Objective 4: Constructing the Raised Bed and In-Ground Garden
Our sponsor and the head of Id Shaliah, Javier Valédon, offered us daily assistance for our garden construction and helped us become familiar with the activities of the community center. He provided the necessary tools to begin construction, giving us access to his entire toolshed for power tools, measuring devices, and the like. Additionally, he provided transportation to hardware stores, dug out the perimeter area for the in-ground garden, and organized the delivery of topsoil to fill our in-ground garden and raised bed. The master gardener of the center, Misael, was a central part of our community mapping activities and during them, he provided us with valuable insight on the layout of the raised garden area and how the in-ground garden should be sectioned. He also gave us valuable information on the crop layout of the garden once we began planting. Coming in knowing we had a budget for our construction materials, we were driven to be resourceful and use recycled materials from the project site and existing tools that we did not have to purchase. Heat treated pallets were found throughout the project site, which we were able to break down and use for the construction of our raised garden bed. Since we were only on site three days a week for three hours a day, we had to be efficient during our time. This included working during and through inclement weather conditions, as it would often rain during our time there. We were able to have meetings indoors in one of the classrooms, working on mapping activities and garden layouts on the whiteboard and holding meetings with potential members of the gardening team to integrate them into the project. Maintaining productivity through these conditions was essential in keeping the project moving forward during our limited work time on site.
Outcomes
Project Overview
Over our 7-week project, we worked at the Cubuy-Lomas community center on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. We worked from 10AM-2PM on most project site days, however some days required us to work longer than our usual time if there was more construction to be completed. This was the case during our final days of construction for the raised bed prototype and filling the in-ground garden space with topsoil, as both had final steps to be completed within a time constraint. On days we weren’t at the project site we worked to develop our how-to guide, combining general community gardening advice from our research and personal information from our hands on experience working at the community center.
Raised Bed
We constructed a raised bed garden measuring 8’2” long by 2’4” wide by 2’6” tall, from recycled heat-treated pallets. This includes a removable PVC shade cover which was added for accommodating plants with a greater need for shade, such as cilantro, oregano, and other leafy greens. We designed one raised bed as a prototype; the cement block could potentially fit up to 7 additional raised beds of similar size, allowing for expansion of the gardening program over time.
In-Ground Garden
We created an in-ground garden bed measuring 12’4 ft x 18’ ft sectioned into two plots for optimal access when gardening. The garden space was dug out to enhance it with fresh topsoil. This space is intended for vegetables that require more root space such as beets, sweet potatoes, peppers, etc. The garden space is also equipped with a drainage route that runs down the side of the mountain. A path made of recycled heat-treated pallets runs through the middle of the space, allowing accessibility to both sides of the garden.
How-To Guide
In anticipating the potential conditions and situations in which other communities might pursue similar projects, the guide addresses potential obstacles and varying scenarios, including environmental constraints, resource limitations, and levels of community engagement. It is split up into three phases, envisioning the garden, marketing plan and garden construction, and creating community engagement, all of which have a number of subsections describing key concepts to progress each phase. Each of the subsections contains general community gardening information, combined with our personal experiences from our time at the Cubuy-Lomas community center in the form of case studies. Key components include material research and procurement, construction planning, strategies for community outreach, marketing approaches for produce sales, and the formulation of a long-term garden management plan. The guide also includes a number of tools that can be used throughout a community gardening project, including construction planning help in the form of a materials/tools list and budget and recyclable materials substitute, community involvement tools like a volunteer form and participant schedule, and garden planning tools like a garden suitability checklist.
Data Tools
We created several practical tools for both Id Shaliah and also for any organizations or community groups facing similar needs. These include:
- Crop Maintenance Sheet
- This tool provides details for each crop, including potential profit, growing seasons, ideal temperature ranges, water needs, and the sunlight requirements. This helps users make more informed decisions about what to plant and how to maintain it. This tool has the potential to support effective gardening planning and increase chances of cultivating a successful harvest.
- Material Substitute List
- We created this tool to help gardeners replace store-bought expensive materials with more sustainable, recyclable alternatives. It lists common materials such as lumber, plants pots, greenhouse kits, and provides eco-friendly substitutes such as heat-treated pallets, car tires, or DIY PVC structures. The tools also explain the purpose of each material in the garden, and help users identify where they can reduce waste, lower costs, and promote sustainability.
- Materials/Tools List and Budget
- We created a spreadsheet to estimate the costs for building raised beds and in-ground beds. It outlines the materials used (such as pallets, lumber, screws,) their unit costs, quantities, and total costs, providing a breakdown for each garden structure. It also lists the essential tools needed, such as a power drill and saws. This document helps manage resources efficiently and can serve as a guide for anyone with a similar project.
- Volunteer Interest Form
- We created to collect input from community members interested in participating in or supporting the garden project. It helps us understand people’s interests, available time, skills, and specific needs while also identifying potential volunteers, contributors, or leaders. The survey is a key tool for building community engagement, ensuring the garden reflects local priorities, and fostering a sense of shared ownership and collaboration.
- Garden Suitability Checklist
- We created this checklist to help communities and individuals quickly evaluate whether a space is appropriate for starting a garden. It guides users through essential site conditions: such as sunlight, shade, water access, drainage, airflow, and distance from structures, ensuring they select a location that supports healthy plant growth and long-term success. This checklist helps make sure that garden projects are set up on a strong foundation, increasing the chances of sustainability and impact.
- Community Garden Work Schedule
- This schedule was created to organize volunteer activities, monthly tasks and events. It outlines weekly meeting time, key activities for each day, and important reminders. This schedule can be used as a template and guide for coordinating garden member participation. Potential benefits can be clear communication. Inclusivity, and smooth teamwork across different phases of the garden.
Meaningful Engagement Beyond Project Goals
During our time working at the Cubuy-Lomas community center, our project allowed us to build valuable connections with members of the Cubuy-Lomas and Canovanas communities. Our weekly transportation to the center on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was set up through the municipality, and during this time we were fortunate enough to become familiarized with the Cubuy-Lomas area through our driver Abraham. During our drives we would hold brief conversations to attempt to bridge the communication barrier, and he would often give us tours around the neighborhood and take us to experience the food and culture. In addition to Abraham we were able to build relationships with regular visitors of the center, including Misael, Junior, Maria, Antonio, and Ramon, all of whom provided valuable feedback throughout the project process and made us comfortable at the community center by having casual conversations with us outside of the project work. Integrating ourselves as active volunteers at the Cubuy-Lomas community center was perhaps our most gratifying and useful accomplishment. We were able to fix the inventory scanner at the center by setting up the system with the Sponsor’s laptop, allowing the scanner to be used in the thrift store and for organizing donation boxes within the storage rooms. Our team was also able to help organize donations and break down the boxes for recycling, a large task for the limited members of the center. Trucks full of various donation materials (clothes, books, shoes, blankets) were donated multiple times throughout our time, and we helped to unload the trucks and organize them within the donation rooms. Although not part of our formal project deliverables, these experiences represent a significant contribution to the relationship between WPI and Id Shaliah.
Findings
Through interviews, site visits, and direct engagement with the community and our sponsor several findings based on challenges and progress emerged throughout the duration of our project. We found that one of the greatest challenges in creating a community garden and involving locals is motivating consistent volunteer participation. There was often sporadic involvement and attendance with some struggling to engage with some individuals facing clear communication barriers that limited their engagement. To address this, we built relationships with volunteers and offered incentives such as meals and produce from the garden, though these efforts had limited effect. Due to the struggles in maintaining standard jobs and hours, as well as their own mental and physical health, volunteering time may not be feasible for members of every community. We also found that community centers have many moving parts that constantly require attention. This environment fosters much teamwork, but also routine and structure, which allows for productivity but limits space for additional tasks. While having more volunteers can be helpful for larger tasks, we learned that being self-driven was often more practical, as other volunteers and staff were frequently occupied with their own responsibilities. This taught us how to overcome issues on our own, as well as fine tune our planning skills to ensure our productivity in the given time. Overall, we found that creating a garden from scratch takes time and patience. The start of the process takes much planning with the development of multiple possible layouts and outcomes, including the thoughts and opinions of many different people. Once the plan is made, it takes more time to gather the proper materials and tools, as well as preparing the space to be planted in. It takes much work, which can be difficult especially in inclement weather and when facing unforeseen events that may alter neatly laid out plans. This taught us flexibility and patience to take the time that is needed to fully understand the process before acting but also to be prepared for issues as they arise.
Recommendations
To ensure the long-term success and sustainability of the project, we offer several actionable recommendations for both our sponsor and future garden participants.
Incentive Structure
To begin, it will be necessary to create ongoing motivation for those involved in the community gardening project to ensure the continued maintenance and use of the space. This can be achieved by offering additional benefits, such as free meals and being offered a percentage of garden yields which can be sold to local markets for profit. Assigning specific roles related to garden management can also create motivation, fostering a sense of leadership, ownership, and responsibility within the gardening group.
Garden Work Plan and Activity Schedule
Once the list of committed volunteers is determined, a clear and organized schedule for the participants and anyone involved in the project should be made to maintain organization and professionalism. By completing this step, it establishes both consistent participation for the members and progress for the project. Laying out working activities for participants to review will allow them to engage in the aspects of the garden that they are most interested in, helping maintain involvement and strengthen community bonds through constant interaction.
Instructional Manual and Skill Development
Lastly, we recommend making a physical instruction booklet to guide the care and management of the crops. This booklet should include a list of crops used, details on their required sunlight exposure, watering needs, and necessary seasonal rotation practices. This ensures that the volunteers are educated about their work and can be successful in properly maintaining the garden in order to receive the benefits. It may also allow others who are not directly involved with the garden to educate themselves on how to begin and maintain a garden of their own.
Conclusion
Our project highlights the potential for a community garden to serve as both a source of food and income, while also strengthening the community. By addressing organizational challenges, improving communication, and providing clear guidance for crop management, the garden can become a sustainable and motivating space for local collaborators. With continued support from Id Shaliah and thoughtful implementation of our recommendations, we are confident this initiative will foster long-term benefits for both individuals and the community of Cubuy-Lomas area.
Reflection
Through our community gardening project at the Cubuy-Lomas community center, we gained many valuable lessons. We learned how to work alongside volunteers and members to strengthen the community they care so much about and how to work through and overcome the challenges that come with building two unique gardens from scratch with little to no experience. Getting fully immersed in the culture was just another added benefit to the project, as each person we interacted with at the community center welcomed us with open arms, offering us guidance, feedback, or even just casual conversation to make us more comfortable in the space.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to Javier Valédon for his guidance and support with this project. Javier welcomed us warmly into the community center, offered thoughtful guidance on our garden design, and generously provided tools and materials that made this project possible. We also want to extend our thanks to the members of Id Shaliah who volunteer at the community center, providing daily food services and organizing activities that strengthen and uplift the community. We’re deeply grateful for the members of the center who generously shared their time and stories with us. They welcomed us into their space, helped design the garden, and offered their companionship throughout the project. We would also like to thank our advisors Scott and Martin who helped us with every step of the process and provided their guidance and feedback along the way.
Bibliography
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Cubuy-Lomas Community Services & Development Center. (2021). About. Cubuy-lomascenter.org. https://www.cubuy-lomascenter.org/about
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