Roxie Mullins, Advisory Board Member | May 12, 2024
Opportunity House residents spent this Mother’s Day giving back to Mother Nature. On May 12, the residents teamed up with Opportunity House’s advisory board for a social event in which they planted gardens around their living spaces.
Hosting social events is vital to Opportunity House’s mission to connect residents to the St. Louis community. The event provided the advisory board – who sponsored the event – with the opportunity to learn more about the wants and needs of the residents. The advisory board is able to take this information and provide direct input to the organization on policies and procedures that will best meet the needs of residents. And for residents, getting to connect over a fun activity helps them feel more excited and invested in their living space.
Advisory board member Lou Vinarcsik (she/they) previously helped run a community garden at Hidden Alley Ranch, the housing cooperative they call home. While brainstorming ideas for social events at Opportunity House, they remembered how the community garden helped them feel more welcome. A garden isn’t just there to beautify the space; according to Lou, it feels gratifying to come home to flowers you intentionally planted, and growing food gives residents something healthy to eat.
”Personally, gardening brings me a lot of joy and makes me feel much more connected even when I’m in a rental, for example. It can feel kind of like an empowering thing,” Lou said. “So hopefully, just by making some garden beds available for use, then anybody who wants to play around in the dirt or try to grow some things that they inherit or buy at the store … [has] space to do so.”
Advisory board members and residents planned out a garden space together for some of the Opportunity House buildings. One house would have a flower bed in the corner of its backyard, along with a giant raised bed for fruit and vegetable gardening. Because of recent construction, another house had a pile of soil that would’ve led runoff into the basement, so they planned to landscape the front yard and reseed it with grass. Once they directed the rainflow away from the basement, they would plant perennials to retain the soil and prevent erosion.
The team spent a week preparing, and Lou put out a call to source materials and tools. While Opportunity House covered materials like bales of straw, advisory board members brought landscaping fabric, soil, wood and more. Tools were provided by the community garden, though some advisory board members brought tools from home. One person even sourced native grasses and trees to plant in the front yard.
About 10 volunteers showed up to the gardening event; thanks to everyone’s hard work, most of the garden was finished within a few hours. Lou expects that the residents will continue developing the garden this summer as the plants grow, but they were incredibly proud of how much the group accomplished – though, they noted the next social event will hopefully be “more restful” than doing yard work.
Opportunity House’s upcoming social events include fun activities like trivia, board games and sports, but regardless of the activity, what matters most is the residents feeling connected and welcome. This month’s gardening event demonstrated how fulfilling it is for the residents to participate, or even plan out the activities themselves.
“There was one resident in particular who was really excited about gardening and directed a majority of this project, so I think that was really cool,” Lou said. “So if we can continue to have social events where at least one [resident] – ideally more of the residents, but at least one – are super hyped on it, I think that makes for a much better event.”
To learn more about Opportunity House’s events and mission, visit https://opportunityhousestl.org/.
