There will soon be a farm-to-table diner and multiple new core spaces at the Bethel Pace Center Apartments at 4349 Washington Blvd. in West Garfield Park through the Harvest initiative. The ground level of the 22 units of independent senior housing will offer space for both residents and the general public to dine and connect with community.
“Communities like Garfield Park and Austin are considered food deserts. And so many times, access to healthy foods is an issue, especially for our seniors,” said Sharif Walker, president and CEO of Bethel New Life, a nonprofit that provides housing and community services on Chicago’s West Side.
Bethel New Life is leading the project to create the Harvest diner and other spaces inside the Bethel Pace Center Apartments, which it acquired over 30 years ago. Though cooking staff at the Bethel Pace Center Apartments make three meals a day for residents, Bethel New Life hasn’t ever had an eatery in one of its housing projects that is open to the public.
And while Bethel aims to provide fresh food options for older residents, group participants also want them to have more access to locals throughout the community.
“Many of the things happening in some of the communities — Austin, Garfield Park — lead to [seniors] having feelings of not being safe,” Walker said. He added that many local seniors have expressed not wanting to travel too far from home because they need access to medical support. But Harvest allows “opportunities to be in a safe space, to feel at home, but also to be able to engage in community in meaningful ways.”
“What’s happening for a lot of these seniors is they’re seeing all of this development happening in the community, but they don’t necessarily know if this development is for them,” said Jasmine Michaels, CEO of Oases, the development partner for Harvest. A primary goal of the project is “bringing [seniors] back into the community in a playful and fun way. That’s one of the big things that we’ve learned and realized that they care about.”
During a community brainstorming session in September, about 80 seniors and community members gave input on Harvest and identified spaces and programs they wanted to see at the apartment complex — ranging from a craft or board game space to getting trained in new skills, receiving financial advising, hosting live music, and access to quality coffee.
“They have made it very clear that they don’t want Folgers. They want some really good artisanal coffee,” Michaels said.
While Walker said apartment residents haven’t had many past opportunities to integrate with younger community members, creating a comfortable space where that can happen is also a goal of the renovations.
Michaels said one of the best ways to support young people is by giving them opportunities to talk with seniors, “letting them know that there’s somebody who’s older than you, who has more experience, who cares about what you’re going through and has some wisdom that might be able to help you to avoid some of those pitfalls.”
Michaels said there will be another community engagement meeting open to the public, followed by ongoing community meetings once main design decisions are made.
Harvesting inspiration and partnership
The idea for the Harvest initiative came out of inspiration from other community initiatives, and the overall missions of Bethel New Life and Oases, which Michaels said has integrated farm-to-table dining in a number of its projects.
In Austin, Bethel New Life leads the Austin Food Ecosystem, a collaborative that aims to increase food access by promoting healthy food, plus relevant programs and infrastructure.
“How do you take a community that’s been considered a food desert and really start creating these spaces in food, whether it’s education or workforce development or food access or entrepreneurship, and really make it the strength of the community?” Walker said. “We want to be able to expand that vision in Garfield Park as well.”
For Walker, a key component to that expansion is partnership.
“Too often, in communities like ours, you have all of these organizations that are usually in competition with each other for funding,” Walker said. “It was important for us to meet with the masses of organizations that are working in those areas to make sure that we had their buy-in, that they understood what we were trying to create and how they potentially could be a part of it.”
With Bethel New Life leading the project and Oases as the development partner, Jim Webb’s company TRUDelta LLC is the project’s general contractor. TRUDelta LLC is also developing The K Culture Creator Center as part of the Sankofa Wellness Village — a project that Bethel and Oases were also involved with. Oases is also designing a West Side sanctuary outdoor space in the empty lot next to The K and across the street from the Bethel Pace Center Apartments.
“Activating public outdoor space is only viable when it has some type of economic impact in the corridor,” Michaels said. In order to sustain long-term growth with that economic impact, Bethel, Oases and TRUDelta decided to combine the neighboring outdoor gathering space with hospitality and direct services out of Harvest.
Webb is also treasurer of the Garfield Park Right to Wellness Collaborative, which currently leases the ground floor of the Bethel Pace Center Apartments for meetings, though they’ll move into the Sankofa Wellness Village once it opens one block south of the apartments. The collaborative has also been holding community meetings to create a quality-of-life plan for the neighborhood. Harvest’s developers are continuing to work with the collaborative to fill in any existing gaps it identifies for the community.
“It’s really essential that these things align, that what we’re hearing out of the quality-of-life plan are also embedded within this project and that people feel like this is something that is not working in a vacuum, but is working alongside what the community wants to see out of the future of that community,” Walker said. He had a hand in creating both Garfield Park’s quality-of-life plan, and the one for Austin Coming Together, which he was a part of the founding board for.
Other partners for Harvest include WJW Architects and Sesenergi Eco Solutions, a West Side-based workforce development program that offers training for jobs in solar and renewable energy.
Michaels said the estimated cost of Harvest is $2 million. The project has received a pre-development grant from the Chicago Community Trust, and developers have applied for the Chicago Department of Planning and Development’s Commercial Corridor Storefront Activation program, which Michaels said, if granted, would fund the majority of development costs and allow partners to move up the timeline for construction.
