The Test Site- Creating an experimental community garden in the heart of Aalto University
What: The test-site community garden
Year: 2017
Place: Aalto University, Espoo, Finland.
BACKGROUND
I studied the master's programme “Creative Sustainability” at Aalto University. This programme hosts a variety of very concerned, very creative and very vocal students who actively want to make the world a better place. Naturally, my colleagues and I were very vocal about our need to have a “space to be creative and experiment with sustainability in practice”. Simultaneously the programme coordinator envisioned a similar space, and in 2017 applied for funding to develop a project where students could experiment with Circular Economy, amongst other sustainability-related interests and thus we created the Aalto Test-Site.
PROJECT
A student-led project, where interested students pitch their ideas to the community and work on their projects, creating synergies between projects, and a community of practice. My interest was to create a community garden where we provide food to the members of the Test Site and we take all the organic waste they want to give us to compost and use to grow more plants!
My initial idea was that we learn about a lot of global issues in school but we are more and more disconnected from nature, I believe that it is very important for students of sustainability to find ways to be and take care of nature, to understand complexity.
In this project, together with other students and other members of the Otaniemi campus, we created a small community garden. For this, we looked for sponsors such as Metsäpirtinmulta for compost and Dodo ry for knowledge and the growing boxes. The idea is to work together and enjoy the literal fruits of our work, but also to experiment: did we read something we are eager to try? Let's do it! Did we find a problem or challenge we don't know how to address? Let’s figure it out
LEARNINGS
As with all projects the learning is very unexpected, here my vision was to experiment with my previous knowledge of permaculture and finally get to do some hands-on learning. However, my biggest learning has been to be a project manager. I was an initial member of the Aalto Test Site which meant that I got to test a lot of ideas, but when it came to engaging other people to join, this also meant I had to be a project leader. In the beginning, I was fighting this a lot, I wanted to have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, but I also wanted other people to join and do it with me. In their eyes, it was my idea and I had the agency, in my eyes we were all in this together. I had to get over my fear of being perceived as "bossy" and be the boss in my way, which was hard but taught me I can be a leader. Now, as I graduated I too need to learn to let go of this project and let the newcomers take over, it is the time for someone else to learn to be a leader.
