Photography by Ronit Fahl. Retrieved from modernfarmer.com
In 2007, Emiko Chantal Chung was asked to help plan a multi-million-dollar civic center on land that was once a botanical garden she had wandered through as a child. The land had since turned into an illegal dumping ground.
At the time, she was working for a Hawaiian culture-based preschool as a family advocate and, while the civic center was supposed to be for the community, Chung felt an intuitive nudge that the land was meant for something else.
A year later, the recession hit and investors pulled out of the project. It was then that she and two of her friends, Hala Medeiros and Lovey Simmons, realized they wanted to build more for their children and opt into a decolonized system of living that favors people over profit.
“So we started off with food. How can everybody be fed?” says Chung.
Over the next four years, a grassroots effort of volunteers, neighbors and equipment donors helped clean up the land to prepare it for what was next: Ma’ona Community Garden,Hawai’i Island’s first community garden. Founded by Chung, Medeiros and Simmons, the garden grew out of an effort to create more community access to nutritious, sustainably grown food.