How inner-city community gardening projects are making a difference

The NCAD Community Garden Farm was founded on a site which, according to former NCAD Students’ Union member and one of the garden’s founders, Rian Coulter, was “a complete cesspit of absolute urban hazards”. The garden, which is next door to the college, exists on a site which is owned by NCAD and which is part of the old Powers Distillery site on which the college is built.

The garden farm was set up by two Students’ Union members, Coulter and Fabian Strunden, and community gardener Tony Lowth. Coulter says that when faced with a huge abandoned lot in the city centre, it just made sense to “to put some sort of urban gardening or horticultural project into it because it was the most accessible, doable and also positive thing to do.”

Support from NCAD

Strunden, who served on the Union from June 2012 to June 2013, did the initial research into the possibility of the project and presented the proposal to NCAD’s senior management who, Coulter says, were “not so enthusiastic about such an ambitious proposal.” Coulter, who served on the following year’s Union, says that it was the involvement of Lowth in late 2013, and his taking responsibility for the project, that led to the college taking the proposal more seriously and giving it the go ahead. The onsite work began in March 2014.

Coulter has a background with the Green Party and An Taisce, while he says Strunden came to the project from more of “an art and design perspective”. It was Lowth, in particular, who wanted the project to be, in part, a “social outlet, particularly for disadvantaged people in the inner city.”

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