Headquartered in a densely urban neighborhood in South Providence, Southside Community Land Trust (SCLT) is a nonprofit organization that provides garden plots to city dwellers interested in growing their own healthy produce. For more than 25 years the land trust has benefited its local community — composed largely of recent immigrants, elderly and low-income residents — by improving access to good nutrition, encouraging self-sufficiency and building connections between neighbors. Along the way, SCLT’s efforts have also resulted in the greening of neglected parts of the city, as roughly five acres’ worth of vacant lots have been transformed into carefully maintained gardens.

Industrial Design Professor Emeritus Bob O’Neal has a track record of engaging his students in socially and environmentally meaningful projects. A supporter of SCLT, he initiated a project that would generate money-making ideas for the organization and also “get students interested in community gardening and the Southside,” he explains. The studio Gardening for Community and Profit emerged as a joint venture between his class of junior ID majors, SCLT and an industry partner — ITEM New Product Development, a Providence firm (founded by RISD graduates) that helps bring ideas from concept to market. Once O’Neal had met with SCLT’s Executive Director Katherine Brown and other staff to discuss areas of opportunity, his students got to work developing products and services that the organization could use to raise money. ITEM principal Aidan Petrie MID ’85 gave students valuable feedback throughout the process, and a research assistant from ITEM helped out with technical details.

A wide variety of concepts emerged as students split into groups or worked on their own. Olivia Rapp ’09 ID, Hyo Eun Park ’09 ID, Eunice Kim ’09 ID and Seyeon Nam ’09 ID, for instance, used one of SCLT’s existing assets — a pickup truck — as the foundation for a mobile produce market. “A big problem among our user group, the immigrant population, is lack of transportation,” Rapp notes. “Their diets are determined by what’s at the corner store” — meaning that healthy choices aren’t always accessible. Her group fashioned an insert, equipped with storage pockets and a canopy, to convert the back of the truck into a produce stand that “brings the garden to the people.” Another group developed multipurpose gardening products as part of a brand called Season’s Best that would “foster a sense of community identity” among garden patrons, explains Stephanie Castilla ’09 ID. She worked with Tiffany Jon ’09 ID and Rebecca Chang ’09 ID on an apron that converts neatly into a bag, a toolkit and a harvesting bag that doubles as a backpack.

To help generate immediate income for SCLT, O’Neal and his students also developed a composting system for the organization to sell at its popular annual plant sale in May. Designed for small-scale home gardeners, the ingeniously simple three-bucket kit includes all the ingredients for getting started — sawdust, lime, paper and a stirrer — and sells for $45. And for a couple of days near the end of the semester, the students contributed to SCLT in a completely different way: exchanging laptops and desks for trowels and wheelbarrows, they spent several hours working in SCLT’s gardens. For these committed designers, sunshine and soil provided a welcome change of pace before the final push to finish end-of-semester studio projects.