Wilsonville Spokesman Online

Garden provides sensory experience for tots of incarcerated moms

Rotary still looking for donations to enhance the planting area

• By: Josh Kulla  
• Published: 9/22/2009 3:53:10 PM

Submitted photo
This garden plot is the former "yard" of an Early Head Start program at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. The Rotary Club of Wilsonville is looking for donations to help enhance the new garden spot.

Coffee Creek Correctional Facility is unique in its position as Oregon’s only women’s prison.

As such, it should be no surprise to learn Coffee Creek has an Early Head Start Child Development Center serving a small number of mothers incarcerated there along with their children That’s what gave Wilsonville Rotary Club member John Ludlow the initial idea to use Rotary Club resources to build and maintain a 40-foot long metal awning over the patio of the Head Start building inside the Coffee Creek complex in Northwest Wilsonville.

“(It was) so that, regardless of sun or drizzle, moms and their children could be outside,” Ludlow said.

That was five years ago. Now, Ludlow and his fellow Rotarians are going the next step.

In recent weeks, using donated materials from the city of Wilsonville and private individuals, Rotarians have constructed a new garden area in what formerly was the “yard” of the Early Head Start building.

Now, they’re looking for the public’s help to complete the project.

“Sharon Bolmeier contacted me this summer and asked if Rotary could build several large garden areas in the yard,” Ludlow said.

Bolmeier is the manager of day-to-day operations at the Head Start center, which is managed by Community Action, a Hillsboro group that works with incarcerated women and their children. She said the need to better promote sensory experiences in infants and toddlers helped spur her to work toward a garden.

“The reason we wanted a garden is to give the kids and moms other experiences,” Bolmeier said. “While they’re here, we want to promote early sensory experiences for children, touch, taste and smell, that kind of stuff, and our outside was really kind of lacking.”

She also hopes it will one day provide another source of organic vegetables, fruits and berries for the entire facility, much like an existing garden in the prison’s minimum security wing.

“We had just had grass here and it was just really bare,” Bolmeier said. The Physical plant had their inmates come in and till up the ground for us, and we marked off an area that we want to plant. So now we have our ground tilled, our dirt delivered and we’re ready to go. So, our next step, we have a plan, we’ll have to see how much we plant.”
 
Now awaiting decoration
In recent weeks, the outlines of the new garden have come into focus.

On Sept. 17, Ludlow and fellow Rotarian Doug Fairrington installed retaining walls made of cedar and metal stakes, as requested by Early Head Start. The next day, Coffee Creek inmates put into place some 10 cubic yards of topsoil using Coffee Creek’s own dump truck.

Finally, former Rotarian Dick Jenks has donated approximately 225 square feet worth of new sod, which will be available when he harvests at the end of September.

Total cost of the project was just $562. Inmates, Early Head Start staff and Rotary volunteers will perform upkeep of the new garden.

“The basics are done, the Rotary portion of the plan is now completed,” Ludlow said. “(But) there are many items needed to enhance the planting areas that we created. They include birdbaths, large planting pots, bird feeders, a compost bin, tolls and more.”

Toward that end, Ludlow and Bolmeier are hoping to find these things somewhere in the local community.
"There’s not a lot going on for inmates, so this is something that’s been great," Bolmeier said. "Our work is about attachment and bonding between the moms and their kids, and really strengthening the relationship if they had one, and building one if the didn’t."
 
At A Glance
Early Head Start Child Development Center Coffee Creek Correctional Facility To donate these items or help with their purchase, contact Ludlow at 503-682-3419 or by email at john70@hevanet.com. For information on Early Head Start or how to donate to the project, contact Bolmeier at 503-570-6875.

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