When grocery stores closed down in Camden, N.J., residents were left living in food deserts. But community members stepped up and turned these vacant lots into community gardens.
Engineers Without Borders USA Rutgers University Chapter helped bring water to these lots. In the process, they gained real-world experience in meeting people’s unique engineering needs.
“It’s important not to over-engineer a problem and [instead] to listen to the gardeners,” said Jakub Chmiel, EWB-USA Rutgers Chapter member. He led the project alongside fellow Chapter member Carson Hess.
They began by assessing two community garden lots. Volunteer gardeners for these lots had to carry water in five-gallon buckets from a water source over three blocks away. They took 50 trips twice a week. If these two garden sites had proper irrigation, they would be able to provide more produce for the community’s food kitchen.
One Project, Multiple Solutions
Nearby church elders tended to one of the gardens. They wanted children in the congregation to experience growing, preparing and eating their own produce. This meant hand-watering the plants. Understanding that requirement led the engineering students to craft a solution that included spigots and rubber hoses.
But the EWB-USA Rutgers Chapter soon experienced the human side of engineering and learned how clients’ differing needs can affect a project.
Two other gardeners—known to the team simply by their first names, Gus and Pedro—wanted a drip irrigation system. The Chapter designed and built a more complicated system for those gardeners. It involved a structure to capture precipitation, rain barrels, a solar energy-powered pump, and 200 feet of tubing to pipe the water to the garden irrigation system.
“There is no solutions manual,” said Carson. “Success depends on our team. If we don’t communicate, we can’t implement.”
A Growing Team and a Growing Effort
Carson said the project was a confidence booster for the Chapter. They relied on fundraising efforts to pay for the project costs. These efforts also boosted publicity for EWB-USA Rutgers University Chapter.
The Chapter grew from five to 20 students who regularly made the 90-minute drive from campus to the gardens in Camden. They developed both a technical team who oversaw the projects, and a marketing team who raised funds and community support.
“Once we started talking to the community members, we ended up with more [garden plots] than we can handle,” said Jakub.
He said he advises other student chapters to “get to know the community around you.”
The EWB-USA Rutgers University Chapter students attended Camden Garden Club meetings so they could learn about the community. This allowed the students to learn about the gardeners’ everyday concerns and better engineer solutions to their needs.
The city of Camden owned 4,000 lots that they handed off to community members to garden. The EWB-USA Rutgers University Chapter project at the gardens fell under the organization’s Community Engineering Corps program, an alliance of the the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Water Works Association and EWB-USA that harnesses the expertise of volunteer engineers to help underserved communities in the United States.
Note: This story was originally published by Engineering360.