"It's a joy to feel like you're making a difference"—Chatham's Partnership with the Oasis Project
This article was originally published in the Winter 2021 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
“It’s one of those relationships where you’re like, ‘where did it start?’” laughs Cynthia M. Wallace, the executive pastor of Bible Center Church and executive director of the Oasis Project, the community and economic development division of Bible Center Church. “Pastor Cynthia,” as she is widely known, is talking about the partnership between the Oasis Project and Chatham University, which has been going on for years, but no one can say exactly how many.
While past collaborations have included Chatham’s interior architecture and education programs, this time, it’s the Falk School of Sustainability & Environment that has assumed center stage. Read on for an overview of some of the ways that the Oasis Project and Chatham University are working together for a brighter, healthier tomorrow.
Tacumba Turner, Oasis Farm & Fishery manager, and Chris Murakami, assistant professor of agroecology, walk through the gardens at the Farm & Fishery.
Background: Homewood
Located just over two miles east of Chatham’s Shadyside campus lies the neighborhood of Homewood, home to the Bible Center Church. Homewood is a food desert, an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food, although Oasis Farm & Fishery manager Tacumba Turner dislikes the term. “Desert implies that it’s natural,” he says. “But food deserts are created through very deliberate policy decisions.”
Learning Through Food
Part of the mission of the Oasis Farm & Fishery is to provide urban farming education for people of all ages. To that end, Turner has been working with Chatham Assistant Professor of Agroecology Chris Murakami, Ph.D. and the students in Murakami’s course “Learning Through Food.”
“One of the awesome programs that Tacumba runs is “Better Food, Better Me” (which teaches students about food literacy and creating healthy recipes using the produce grown) and our class helped them better understand where they were with their programming with regard to their goals and intentions, and helped them develop a framework for a lesson plan that centers the program’s key priorities of sensory and cultural exploration,” says Murakami. “Oasis Farm & Fishery already had numerous lesson plans, but they’re in the process of getting them formalized into a structure that can help them with training and capacity building. It was a great experience for the students to simultaneously get to know an organization and also work on deliverables that were actionable for the organization.”
A community member works with Master of Sustainability student and Oasis intern Alexa Page-Boyd (right) to harvest in the garden.
“I think the work we do in the community is inspirational for students, and I think the ability to live out the community service part of Chatham’s mission is a win for them, too.”
Urban Agriculture
This past term, Murakami’s “Urban Agriculture” class collaborated with Oasis in a couple of areas. One was strategic planning and stakeholder engagement. “It started with the students getting to understand not just Oasis’s growth trajectory, but also the broader history and context of Homewood, which provided a lot of depth and texture for exploring the phenomenon of urban agriculture,” says Murakami. He and his students helped Oasis with their analysis of market research undertaken to investigate the feasibility of a subscription community supported agriculture (CSA) program. “The students used design tools, like a persona profile, to help Oasis characterize one of their major target participants and were able to help them analyze and synthesize quantitative and qualitative data that they were getting from their survey. That was pretty awesome, in terms of the level of depth students were able to get at in terms of understanding Oasis and some of their community members, seeing some authentic real-time applications of how to develop programming and things like that based on data.”
Another team focused on soil remediation and soil health. “We had some soil assessments done, and the students were thinking about what could be a remediation plan for addressing some of the factors that affected the soil resources that we had,” says Murakami. “They got to apply some of the concepts that were covered in the urban agriculture class in the context of a real-life community organization.”
Nick Sirio, MAFS ’22 helped to create the forest garden as part of his thesis for Chatham. Here, among the fledgling Paw Paw trees protected by mesh he talks with Tacumba Turner, Jr., Oasis Farm & Fishery Program Manager.
Nick Sirio’s Master’s Thesis
Oasis owns a plot of land—about a tenth of an acre in size—across the street from the farm and fishery. “They wanted to convert that space into a “forest garden”—a perennial gardening area that’s somewhere between a forest and a garden,” says Master of Arts in Food Studies student Nick Sirio ’22. “That was also my idea for a thesis, and they were very open to me doing a design for them.”
“I wanted to do something that was moving back toward how indigenous people managed the land, with more trees for fruit than monoculture crops, and that linked up with their desire to have the space be an example of that. Tacumba also wanted it to be a ‘third space’—a space outside of school and home where kids and the community can go hang out,” says Sirio.
The youth participants in “Better Food, Better Me” were involved from the beginning. “The forest garden will be here longer than any of us,” says Sirio. “So we’re trying to give the kids a stake and a sense of ownership in it so they can continue the legacy of being involved in the space and guiding how it develops.”
Sirio and Turner held three engagement sessions. “First we introduced the concept and got a feel for what the kids wanted in terms of fruit trees and berries, and then I brought in maps and design software so the kids could walk through the design in virtual reality and give us their feedback.”
There are currently 30 trees planted in the forest garden, and Turner and Sirio have plans for more to come. “We think of this as the establishment of an ongoing project,” says Sirio. “It’s designed to be a really complex system, and there’s an ecological process that has to happen before it can change from a mown lawn to a forest, with lots of variables, such as weeds, things being blown in on the wind, what animals start coming to visit. Chatham can help with monitoring and analysis.” Murakami adds that the “Learning Through Food” class could help support the forest garden with lesson plans and resources that go along with having the space come to life.
CRAFT and the Community Kitchen
The Oasis Project also runs a community kitchen—a kitchen space for anyone who has a food business—and Chatham’s Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT) was instrumental in helping it get up and running.
“They knew they wanted to have a kitchen space and knew kind of what it was going to look like and where it was going to be,” says Nicolette Spudic, food innovation lab manager for CRAFT. “They wanted to find a way into the market and make sure it was priced appropriately, but also to make sure they were making money. So one of the first things we did was a comparative analysis looking at other community kitchens in the U.S. with similar values and a non-profit structure like the Bible Church has to understand what the best options for them were.”
Rondale Harper, kitchen manager of Oasis Kitchen, preparing food for Everyday Café.
CRAFT also helped the community kitchen create a pricing strategy and assisted with getting health department certification. “Getting certified is a difficult process and nerve-wracking,” says Spudic. “Once we were through that, it was smooth sailing.”
“The commercial kitchen is already super busy, it’s making revenue, it’s helping small business owners, not just in their community but outside. They’re doing really great work, purchasing local when they can, working with local suppliers when they can. It feels really nice to work with such a dynamic group of people who are doing so much for their community and for Pittsburgh in general,” says Spudic.
CRAFT has also worked with Everyday Café, a coffee shop that is a social enterprise of the Oasis Project. “They had to close because of COVID, and then wanted to open back up but didn’t want to do it the same way because they weren’t particularly profitable,” says Spudic. “So we stripped the menu down, changed the food supplier, did some training, and now they’ve built the menu up—it’s larger and there’s more variety on it.”
Cynthia M. Wallace, executive pastor of Bible Center Church and executive director of the Oasis Project, and Nicolette Spudic, Food Innovation Lab manger for CRAFT in the commercial kitchen at the Bible Church.
“The commercial kitchen is...helping small business owners, not just in their community but outside. They’re...purchasing local when they can, working with local suppliers when they can. It feels really nice to work with such a dynamic group of people who are doing so much for their community and for Pittsburgh in general.”
Roy Weitzell, Chatham aquatic laboratory director, consults with Tacumba Turner on the aquaponics system at the Oasis Farm & Fishery.
A win-win situation
“It’s a joy to feel like you’re making a difference,” says Chatham Aquatic Laboratory Director Roy Weitzell, who has consulted with Oasis Farm & Fishery on their aquaponics system. “It’s quite rewarding to work with Oasis, knowing that my knowledge and expertise is making a real connection to actual community members and actually helping them have a more secure food system.”
Of course, the community members aren’t the only ones benefiting. “I think the work we do in the community is inspirational for students, and I think the ability to live out the community service part of Chatham’s mission is a win for them, too,” says Wallace. “The students benefit, but we as an organization also benefit from the expertise that Chatham brings to the community. Being able to leverage the power of a university to further our work is an amazing relationship, and having students to bring a breath of fresh air to our work is a blessing.”
Plants growing in the aquaponics system
If you’re interested in learning more about these Chatham projects, check out CRAFT’s intiatives and our Falk School of Sustainability's programs and offerings.