When A Good Project Goes Awry: Community Re-Connecting With An Urban Farm

This paper reports on two years of maintaining an urban community farm in the City of Greensboro, North Carolina. Staff from Project Green Leaf (PGL) worked with a resettled Mon- tagnard refugee community on farming for home consumption and for market. Increased participation led to an increased area of land under cultivation and abundant harvests. Farming on the community farm provided means for the resettled immigrants to express solidarity, as well as maintain social linkages, relations of power and some of their cultural heritage. Neighboring residents, who had been invited to participate, elected to harvest only rather than plant to eat or plant to sell. By the end of the season the farm underwent major transformations with a number of unintended outcomes