Rooted in Community

Looking over Linda Vista Park, Sofia Gonzales and her mom, Diana Gonzales, chatted quietly on the balcony of their new apartment. “I wonder why there’s so much trash in that area of the park right there,” said 7-year-old Sofia. It was their first morning in the apartment, and the family had struggled for years to get themselves settled in the neighborhood. “Mom,” Sofia said, “Do you know what would be a great idea? What if there was a community garden in that spot?”

Little did Sofia and Diana know that within a few years, Bayside Community Center, led by Executive Director Kim Heinle ’11 (MA in international relations) and Associate Director of the Bayside Environmental Learning Center Amy Zink, would coordinate a community process to create a garden there. Alongside the San Diego Parks Foundation and countless community partners, residents, donors, elected officials, volunteers and the Linda Vista Grows Steering Committee, Bayside pulled together a team to transform the disused corner of the park into the exact dream that Sofia envisioned.

The Linda Vista Community Garden became the first garden built into an existing San Diego city park. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria ’00 (BA in history and political science) attended the opening, community foundations provided financial support and Local 619 Carpenters Union members volunteered their skills to build garden beds. The garden became a focal point for a community of new and experienced gardeners vitalizing their neighborhood.

“Community members are at the core of what Bayside is and what makes this Linda Vista community so vibrant,” Heinle says. “We strive to make sure their voice and well-being are at the forefront of any project, just like the one we did last fall with Dr. Syring.”

In Fall 2024, students enrolled in Anthropology 460: Ethnographic Field Methods, with Department of Anthropology Chair and Professor David Syring, PhD, worked in partnership with the Bayside Community Center to produce storytelling videos with the community’s gardeners. The collaboration offered students hands-on learning through a partnership with a key University of San Diego community-engagement collaborator.

“What’s unique about Bayside is the longevity of our partnership and our commitment to it,” USD Community Engagement Director John Loggins says. “It’s been a successful partnership because we co-create together, and it’s relationship-based. That partnership epitomizes how we want to show up.”

Loggins says the partnership between Bayside and USD has been developing for more than a decade, with many successes, some failures and, most importantly, a constant process of learning.

Students volunteered several times while listening to the stories of the garden and then arranged to work in triads made up of two USD students with one gardener. The students and gardeners collaborated to create multimedia versions of their stories.

“This is our first time as an anthropology department really working with the Linda Vista [Bayside] Community Center and the garden,” anthropology major Aaron Buchanan says. “For me, it’s a start to a relationship. It’s a start to a project and to any number of things that it could be in the future.”

The process, modeled after community workshops developed by StoryCenter, centers the storyteller’s voice alongside images, videos and music to convey experiences in vivid form.

Teams created seven videos, each under five minutes in length. The stories explore themes including creating community, the joy of working with soil and plants, immigration and the challenges of finding meaning in a home during difficult times.

“I’ve been using this approach in my classes and in my own research for more than 10 years,” Syring says. “Putting community members’ voices at the center of the research process changes everything. It creates pathways of agency for the community and helps student researchers learn to listen deeply.”

Syring, who became USD’s Department of Anthropology Chair in August 2024, created the Participatory Ethnography Lab and Studio at USD (PELS@USD) to train students in digital and participatory methods for community-based research. PELS@USD projects incorporate active learning strategies with new and existing courses, leading to student-led public ethnography projects with community collaboration. Partners participate in all aspects of designing and conducting research, as well as creating media, to serve community stakeholders.

In the student videos, community members like Red Killian shared experiences from 80 years of gardening, art and community making. Recordings of Killian playing guitar became the soundtrack for several stories. Christina Martinez shared how she’s carried forward the legacies of seed saving and growing plants from the farm where she grew up in Oaxaca. Robert Hibdon spoke of his development as a gardener, beginning with learning from his grandfather, a Cherokee in Oklahoma who kept a garden and taught lessons about rotating crops for soil health. Zink shared about the development of the Linda Vista Community Garden itself — a labor of skilled leadership and community building.

Students reflected on the unique opportunity that community-engaged learning provides. Caroline McElhannon, double major in anthropology and biology, says, “This project was really cool, because you don’t always get to go into the communities where you go to school and implement all the things you’ve been learning in your classes to get a tangible result.”

“This project helped me learn more about San Diego on a more intimate level,” anthropology major Oz Fox says. “I learned that San Diego is a great big jigsaw puzzle of people from all different walks of life. And there is value in that diversity of experiences.”

The course wrapped up with an end-of-semester celebration at Bayside Community Center. The storytellers and their families hosted the students for a premiere of the videos, which Bayside plans to feature at upcoming events.