After the release of the new Envision 2040 General Plan in 2011, the city moved quickly on changes to support urban agriculture. In January 2012, in an amendment to Title 20 of the San Jose Municipal Code, the Zoning Ordinance, a new ordinance was approved to allow Neighborhood Agriculture as a permitted use in residential zoning districts . In 2013, this was extended to industrial districts and aquaponics was added to the code as a permitted use with special permit. In 2014, the permitted use of neighborhood agriculture and aquaponics was extended to PQP Public/Quasi-Public Zoning District. The Health Trust and other local advocates have played an important role in creating these changes, as well as other changes in municipal code to support gardening and farmers markets . With funding from the Santa Clara County Public Health Department for one year, the Campaign for Healthy Food San Jose, led by the Health Trust, brought together a coalition of the City of San Jose Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, City of San Jose Department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services, FIRST 5 Santa Clara County, Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association, and Working Partnerships USA. In describing the campaign, Acting Director of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services, Julie Edmonds-Mares, explained a context where budget cuts over the last decade had led to decreased available funding for city departments to address health goals outlined in the new General Plan. The community garden program manager, Manuel Perez , also lamented the inability of the program to expand due to budget constraints .

Through the campaign,growing blueberries the department was “exploring alternative financing and community partnership models that can result in increasing neighborhood access to healthy foods while minimizing the cost to the City of San Jose.”The Planning Commission stated ordinance proposals were “developed in close coordination” with the Campaign and The Health Trust. The Health Trust, a San Jose based non-profit, has over the last half decade initiated a variety of programs and campaigns to change the food landscape of San Jose. The Health Trust, established in 1996 from the sale of four nonprofit hospitals, aimed to manage and distribute the assets from the sale to improve the health and wellness of the community, and has since that time increased their assets value from $54 million and to over $115 million, which benefits the community through grantmaking and program services . The Health Trust has benefited greatly from donations and volunteer support from Silicon Valley tech companies including philanthropic partnerships with The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Cisco Foundation, SanDisk, Silicon Valley Community Foundation , the HEDCO Foundation, and others . In 2014 they won Google’s Bay Area Impact Challenge, winning a $500,000 grant . Campaigns under their Healthy Eating Initiative have included efforts to increase the number of mobile markets and small farmers markets, to bring salad bars to local schools, to support urban agriculture, and to feed hot meals to senior and disabled residents . In Fall 2009, the trust launched the Silicon Valley HealthCorps, an AmeriCoprs funded program that partners the Heath Trust with ten local organizations, to provide these organizations with full-time paid volunteers.

Organizations utilize these volunteers for running over 70 garden and farm projects. In 2009 alone the trust received $342,116 to fund this work . In 2010 and 2011, the trust granted nearly $1 million to local organizations that “seek to transform the health of communities by increasing the availability of fresh and locally grown produce in communities that lack such access” . Garden to Table and its parent organization CommUniverCity, received $175,000 of these funds to develop and implement a new community gardening model . While this model is only recently being developed, the partnership with the City of San Jose that has made this model possible began several years earlier. Zach Lewis and Tracy Minicucci, of Garden to Table, and Greg Currey, of CommUniverCity San Jose’s Growing Sustainably, were instrumental in the change allowing urban agriculture on industrially zoned property . After Farm2 Table partnered with Berry Swenson Builders to turn a lot awaiting development into an urban farm, the city reached out to Lewis to identify needed changes to the land use ordinances that could be barriers to the growth of urban agriculture in the city. In September 2013, the organizations researched and presented best practices from around the country to the Planning Commission and City Council, resulting in action to change the municipal code. CommUniverCity, a non-profit organization fiscally sponsored by the San Jose State University Tower Foundation, functions as a partnership between the City, San Jose State University, and community members interested service learning and community led change . The organization has played a key role in the integration of urban villages into the new General Plan.

Garden to Table was born out of the engagement work of CommUniverCity, when Zach Lewis developed the organization as part of his thesis work in the Urban and Regional Planning Department. San Jose State University faculty play an important role in CommUniverCity . The relationship built between the City, CommUniverCity, The Health Trust, and Lewis has lead to the development of the public-private partnership experiment described below. Schultz and Sichley reported conversations between the Health Trust and the City during the Envision 2040 development period in which the possibility of the trust overseeing the management of community gardens was discussed . In conversations with a garden organization leader in 2013, they also reported being approached by the city to see if the gardener was interested in contracting with the city to manage the community garden program. By August 2012, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services reported the development of two new community garden projects “that involve alternative financing and the use of community partners to operate the site” . The city describes how the community partners would be responsible for the majority of the cost of the project’s development, operations, and maintenance. The first project described is the Garden to Table Gardens, a partnership between Santa Clara Valley Water District and CommUniverCity’s Garden to Table, to develop a 26-plot community garden on SCVWD land near Coyote Creek. This project was ultimately not pursued due to high fees SCVWD was asking Garden to Table to pay for the start-up and maintenance of the project . However, in 2013-2014 Garden to Table was funded through a City of San Jose Community Development Improvement Project Grant to develop a community garden with Bridges Middle School in the same neighborhood and on school district land . On September 24, 2014 Garden to Table broke ground on the Santee Community Garden, which will have plots for three neighborhood schools and thirty families as well as communal gardening areas and a small orchard . Garden to Table has been involved with the start-up and will be staying involved for the first seven months of operation. After that the Franklin McKinley Children’s Initiative, a part of Catholic Charities,plastic pots for planting will be taking over management of the garden with the plan of creating a community governance structure for the garden. Gardeners who have plots at the Santee Garden are required to live within one mile of the site and participate in collective maintenance of the communal spaces . Lewis described that if the garden had been added to the City of San Jose’s community garden program the people in the community wouldn’t actually be able to get plots there because the around 500 people on the city waiting lists would have first priority. Santee neighborhood, a dense and economically disadvantaged Latino community, now has access to a 1/3 acre garden site for at least the next 15 years. The second project described in the city memo, Veggielution, began in 2007. In 2008, the project gained access to one acre of land in Emma Prusch Farm Park, a park in downtown San Jose that is protected for agricultural use. By 2012 the organization signed a five-year contract with two two-year extensions with the City to farm six acres of the park’s land. Associate Director of Veggielution, Mark Anthony Medeiros, described the process of working with the City as “friendly” and “without resistance” including during the competitive proposal process they went through to gain access to the additional five acres.

Veggielution has benefited greatly from Silicon Valley funders, such as a $350,000 grant in 2012 from the NVIDIA Corporation and a $15,000 grant from Cisco in 2013 . The City has exhibited the Veggielution project as a proud example of the value and potentials of public-private partnerships largely because of the NVIDIA grant the organization secured. In 2012 Julie Edmonds-Mares, Acting Director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services applauded the work of the grantor, “Programs like NVIDIA’s Project Inspire not only strengthen community pride but they also enhance health and wellness opportunities for San José residents. We look forward to a fruitful publicprivate partnership among NVIDIA, Veggielution and Emma Prusch Farm Park through Project Inspire and encourage other local businesses to follow in the footsteps of NVIDIA by helping build a sustainable community” . The City has shown interest in exploring public-private partnerships like the one with Veggielution in potential development of projects at the urban fringe including the future Coyote Valley and Martial Cottle Park projects, both located on the southern side of the city . Through partnerships with local non-profits the City has increased the import of urban agriculture in the General Plan and zoning policy and has developed model projects of the use of city land for externally funded and managed community gardens. Through significant support from Silicon Valley funders, the Health Trust and garden projects like Veggielution are in the position to be seen as viable alternatives to municipally run programs such as traditional community gardens. The City, while facing budgetary constraints, looks to these public-private partnerships as a means to more effectively impact San Jose residents. Lewis sees great potential in these partnerships as non-profits can be more creative in using donations, volunteer labor, and building community support quickly . Yet, he warns attention needs to paid to making sure non-profits follow through on their word; city processes hold their departments and workers accountable, so the same standards should apply to these new public-private partnerships. Some questions remain with these relatively new relationships, such as who will benefit from nonmunicipal run programming and how will residents have a say in the management of projects on city land. Projects like the Santee Garden provide an inspiring example ofcity resources supporting community management of land if it is successful. And yet, the continued defunding of the community gardening program puts many hundreds of other gardeners at risk.America is in the grip of a fearsome epidemic. It is an epidemic largely out of the hands of doctors, nurses and scientists—it is the crush of chronic disease, highlighted by the epidemic of overweight and obesity. Rising costs of healthy food and an overall decline in Americans’ fitness make this epidemic even more troubling.Overwhelmed by the challenge, increasing numbers of Americans find bariatric and “lap band”surgery more viable options than improving their diets. Arrayed against their efforts is a far larger force that makes unhealthy foods too tasty, cheap, and abundant to resist. This megaforce is US farm policy. How does legislation that determines what happens on distant farms affect our bodies and our families? We argue that US farm policy has created a food system that damages our health, our environment, and our national security. Much of US farm policy is driven by a complex piece of federal legislation passed by Congress every 5 to 7 years called the Farm Bill. Its most recent iterations were the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 and the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. The Farm Bill is scheduled to be renewed in 2012 and presents a remarkable opportunity to shape our food system and our health for generations to come. What we grow, what we eat, who will profit, the long-term availability of food, and environmental repercussions will all be affected by the provisions of the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill was envisioned to supplement farm incomes, ensure a stable food supply, and support the American farm economy.