Minneapolis
SOO
Line
Community Garden
Community
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Environment
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Connectivity
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Education
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Community ✶ Environment ✶ Connectivity ✶ Education ✶
What We Do
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Community
The garden is a community hub that brings a multiracial, multigenerational group of neighbors together to care for the land, share food, and support one another. The community is stronger because we know our neighbors.
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Education
Soo Line coordinates with Whittier Elementary school and MPS summer youth programming to provide education and access to nature to children. Hennepin County master gardeners and others run workshops throughout the garden season open to the public.
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Giving Back
Each season we are committed to giving back to our community through what we do best — growing food! Last year we donated 400 pounds of produce from our Pillsbury Community Garden.
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Growing
Soo Line includes 100 garden plots for individuals to grow food, including plots dedicated to children and Food Shelf donations. Through our outreach program, dozens of Whittier families from underserved communities, have joined the garden.
Soo Line Community Garden is a park that started as an inspiration from neighbors who saw an empty, tax-forfeited lot filled with litter as the future location for a community garden. In 1991, the neighbors established the Soo Line Community Garden.
The garden built a beautiful front garden, maintained flowers and native pollinators in the boulevards, added plants to the Moen memorial, and built a children’s garden, in addition to a plot tended by kids from the nearby Whittier Elementary School.
This park has grown from a small group of volunteers to over 200 people from all over the world who volunteer to maintain the space and can donate a small fee to have a 10x10 plot. In 2010, Soo Line became an official neighborhood park in the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board.
The garden has benches, a picnic table, and areas for the public to read, eat, meditate, and meet friends. It is a space dedicated to the community.
Soo Line also serves as a place of recreation, education, and youth programming for the Whittier neighborhood and the Whittier Elementary School.
“Life begins the day you start a garden.”
Soo Line Community Garden offers plots for community members to tend to year after year.
Currently, we are on hold until our soil is remediated.
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…similar to a town square…a quiet and tranquil area to talk with neighbors. It has become a greatly needed green space and hub of human activity in an otherwise frequently cold, concrete jungle.”
– L. L., neighbor