Projects

Native plant gardens for a multi-acre property in San Rafael. I converted the existing non-native landscaping into several beautiful native plant gardens designed to restore the land to closely resemble the native ecosystem of San Rafael. I chose plants to increase native pollinators, attract wildlife, particularly birds, minimize fire risk and reduce erosion and water use.

Re-designed home garden for a backyard cottage in Oakland, CA. Using a combination of native and non-native ornamental plants and edibles, I created a dense productive garden with a mix of in-ground plantings, raised beds, and containers that feeds residents year-round. Key to the success of this garden was installing a simple drip irrigation system to ensure even and consistent watering.

Rosa Parks Elementary in San Francisco, CA. This garden sits on the site of a former basketball court. The school community removed the original concrete and brought in soil in 2011. By 2017, the garden was due for a major upgrade to increase production, manage flooding, and to facilitate student inquiry.

I brought in 10 cubic yards of new soil to bring in much-needed nutrients and re-designed the garden to manage stormwater, while creating more organic shapes and curving pathways to encourage students to slow down and feel more engaged in the garden space. I also re-installed drip irrigation for even, consistent watering, especially during school breaks. Within two years, the garden was able to produce enough food for each of the 400 students at Rosa Parks to eat a meaningful meal throughout the course of the school year.

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Outdoor education is one of the primary ways that I facilitate connections to the natural world. Since my very first job in outdoor education at Massachusetts Audubon’s Drumlin Farm in 2008, I have been drawn to working with young people and tapping in to their innate curiosity about the world around them.

My work in outdoor education has mainly focused on K-5 students. For the past five years, I have taught garden education at Rosa Parks Elementary in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and re-designed the CommunityGrows garden education program. In addition to increasing the connection between nutrition, cooking, and garden education by growing and sharing a meaningful amount of food from the garden with the school community, I also re-wrote our curriculum to align with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), better integrated the garden curriculum with other subjects, including building in units on Black History and indigenous knowledge, and updated our teaching tools and classroom management practices to better accommodate and account for student learning differences, cultural experiences, and levels of comfort with the natural world.

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In January of 2021, I began co-facilitating an organizational restructure process at CommunityGrows. The intention of this process was to discuss and build better systems to center equity, diversity, and inclusion at CommunityGrows, and to interrogate and dismantle the dysfunctional power structures that the organization had held on to for the past twenty years. In collaboration with my wonderful colleague August (B) Freas and the incredible Candice Wicks-Davis at Edutainment for Equity, we facilitated many conversations and led working sessions to help CommunityGrows re-organize into working groups and committees to increase knowledge transfer, create decision-making processes, and address wage equity, and build better transparency across our organization.

Building and refining these systems takes time, and they are still in process. If you would like to talk more about my experience building and facilitating an organizational restructure, or would like to reach out for a free one-hour consultation for your workplace, please feel free to contact me.

I would also like to thank the teams and people at Sustainable Economies Law Center, Sociocracy for All, Citizen Film, and Harmonize for generously sharing their time and experiences, and best practices with us throughout this process.

Slide credit: B Freas

Slide Credit: Candice Wicks-Davis

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Anna Luberoff

Projects