SchaferAutismReport: Farm Cultivates A Sense of Community

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

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Vol. 12 No. 139p

In This Issue:

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ADULT COMMUNITY

Farm Cultivates A Sense of Community

•

PUBLIC HEALTH

Measles Timebomb... Just 49 Per Cent of Children Have MMR

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

PEOPLE

Carrey Feared Romance Was Over When McCarthy Disappeared

Autistic Boy Handcuffed At School

’s Last Chance

In Just A Moment, A Life Is Lost

FINANCES

Pennsylvania Adds Autism Coverage as a Mandated Insurance Benefit

RESEARCH

Researchers Reveal Structure of Protein Altered In Autism

Rare Genetic Disorder Gives Clues To Autism, Epilepsy, Mental Retardation

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ADULT COMMUNITY

Farm Cultivates A Sense of Community

By Soren Andersen, The News Tribune, tiny.pl/88xv

Tacoma, Wash. - Out by the driveway, a man

named Greg is carefully shoveling rich compost from a wheelbarrow into a

machine that noisily sifts the organic material. In a nearby greenhouse, a

woman named Debbie is placing soil and plants into small pots. Like Greg,

she is going about her task with the utmost care.

In another greenhouse, a man named Les

sprays water from a hose onto lushly growing plants. Carefully, like the

others.

These folks are fastidious workers.

They're hard workers.

They're developmentally disabled workers.

They're part of a group of people called

core members of the L'Arche Farm & Gardens agricultural complex in

rural Pierce County.

Located about 12 miles southeast of Tacoma

on Vickery Avenue East, it's a small farm - 8 acres with a farmhouse, a

barn and four greenhouses on the property. But it has a large mission, one

that goes far beyond the growing and harvesting of foodstuffs.

" L'Arche is dedicated to the

marginalized and those who have always been cast out. We were founded on

the Gospel values of the New Testament and the Beatitudes, " said

Toohey, the farm's manager.

Much of the food the residents eat in the

homes comes from the farm. As originally conceived, the farm was intended

to produce enough food to feed Tacoma-area core members in the adult homes

with a little left over to sell at farmers markets. Shoppers at the Tacoma,

Sixth and Proctor farmers markets may recognize the farm name. L'Arche

workers sell fresh produce and nursery starts weekly at those markets.

It's a community where people with

developmental disabilities learn life skills by working alongside people

without handicaps. A privately run nonprofit organization, L'Arche receives

partial funding from Pierce County Human Services as well as area

charitable organizations.

The Tacoma-area farm is part of a worldwide

network of L'Arche communities. The term is French for " the ark, "

referring to Noah's ark, and the organization was founded in 1964 in

Trosly-Breuil, a village in northern France, by Vanier, a spiritually

inclined French-Canadian layman who dedicated himself to sharing his life

with and helping people with developmental disabilities.

" You're going to have to learn to share

and be responsible not just to yourself, but to all your roommates "

There are now more than 120 communities in

more than 30 countries. Many are adult family homes. The first L'Arche

community in the Tacoma area, founded in the city in 1977 and called

L'Arche Tahoma Hope, was such a home. There are now three others, including

one on the farm and another a few miles down the road from it. Eighteen

core members live in those four homes, but not all of them work at the

farm.

Those accepted into the program have shown a

desire to socialize with other people like themselves.

" It's a family setting, " Toohey

said and residents are told " you're going to have to learn to share

and be responsible not just to yourself, but to all your roommates, sharing

the responsibility of being in life together. "

Also, the idea was that the farm be run as a

sustainable agricultural operation. That means " all our nutrients that

we use for our plants come from our compost, " said Toohey. " We're

not trucking in stuff. "

Weeds and grass clippings are recycled into

compost. The farm raises chickens, and the droppings are used as

fertilizer.

There are no horses on the property, so

Toohey and his people collect manure from the stalls of nearby farms. Its a

neighborly thing to do. The arrangement is deliberately limited to close

neighbors. " We stay within a three-mile radius, " he said.

Sustainable means local.

And local means that they only sell their produce

on the farm itself and at farmers markets in Tacoma. " We do the Sixth

Avenue Farmers Market, the Broadway Farmers Market and the Proctor Farmers

Market, " Toohey said.

Each market has a distinct personality, he

added. People who patronize the Broadway market are generally office

workers looking for houseplants to decorate their cubicles.

" Proctor customers are more likely to

buy plants that are little more difficult to grow, " he said. Many have

gardens and stock up what he calls " veggie starts: your broccoli, your

greens. They love basil. "

The Sixth Avenue market, being relatively

new, has not yet found a distinctive identity, he said.

Much of the farm's produce is greenhouse

grown. One greenhouse is given over to herbs, with rosemary, thyme, mint,

basil, chives, pineapple sage and fragrant lavender bursting up out of

crowds of pots. Another is full of vegetables: tomatoes, kale, spinach,

lettuce and cabbage. Still another, the largest on the property, is the

flowers greenhouse: geraniums, mums, asters and calla lilies grow in

colorful profusion.

In the fourth greenhouse the prime nutrient

for all this vegetative plenty, heaped-up compost, sits and simmers, making

this the warmest greenhouse on the property.

During the winter when the farm work slows,

core members work on craft projects. One of those is paper-making, and it,

too, is carried out in accordance with the farm's sustainable philosophy.

The raw materials are shredded documents

from the farm's office and flowers - mostly marigolds and sunflowers and

some lavender from the farm's garden. The mixture is soaked in water in a

big plastic trash bin, ground to pulp by a big hand-held grinder and poured

into plastic trays. The trays are taken out to one of the greenhouses and

if a day is sunny the mixture can be dried to paper within 24 hours. The

texture is coarse, but the product is certainly distinctive, and couples

often use the sheets, which measure approximately 6 by 10 inches, for

wedding invitations.

At the moment, there are seven core members

employed at the farm. Their ages range from the 20s to the 50s, Toohey

said. Several have been there for years. Debbie , the woman

transplanting plants in the greenhouse, has worked for L'Arche for 16 years.

Since the farm was founded in 1983, 25 core members have been on the

payroll. They put in a 20-hour week and are paid at about the minimum-wage

rate.

Their disabilities vary in type and

severity, with autism, Down syndrome and syndrome being among the

conditions seen most often among the core workers, Toohey said.

Many more people with disabilities have done

volunteer work there over the years.

The number of volunteers has numbered in the

thousands.

" Last year, in three months, we had

over 500 school-age volunteers, " said the 37-year-old Toohey, who has

worked on the farm for the past 11 years. They came from Clover Park and

lin Pierce high schools, from Academy and St.

Borromeo School.

Fourth-graders come. So do college students

and college graduates.

" We have college kids from the

University of Montana and Gonzaga. They'll spend their spring break here in

volunteer work with the folks, " Toohey said.

Religious organizations affiliated with the

Jesuit order and Lutheran churches have been longtime supporters of the

farm, recruiting students committed to doing social service work for a year

after graduation.

Businesses send volunteers as well.

Employees from stores such as Target, which have disabled people on the

payroll, come out to learn how to work with people with disabilities.

In some cases, they wind up working for a

disabled person, at least for a while. " Kids from all diverse

backgrounds come in and say, 'Oh, I'm going to help these guys on the

farm,' and all of a sudden Les (Liese, the man we met earlier with the

hose) is in charge of them, telling them what to do, " Toohey said.

Together, volunteers and core members and a

handful of paid staff people, including Toohey, perform all kinds of farm

chores: planting, harvesting, seeding, weeding, watering and sometimes

shoveling up animal poop used for fertilizer.

The volunteers are more than welcome, Toohey

said, and he even goes out into the community to recruit them through

schools, business and civic organizations like the United Way.

Trained staff members are present at all

times to help the disabled workers and volunteers work smoothly together.

People who want to commit more time than say a school group that may come

out for just a day are generally required to take a training course from

the state Department of Social and Health Services.

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