News & Updates

It was a sunny afternoon when Neighborhood Alliance staff sat down to speak with Allen Parlier at Commonwealth Urban Farms. Commonwealth is located the Central Park neighborhood in Oklahoma City’s Ward 2. In addition to being a natural reprieve from the urban environment, the farms serve as a place of community care seeking to create green pockets in an urban space and increase our local food production.

Allen is one of the driving forces behind Commonwealth, but if you were to ask him, he would tell you it’s the community that makes any of it possible. What has turned into a thriving urban farm started as a community organizing initiative with front yard gardens.  

Allen told us that when he moved to the Central Park neighborhood in the 1980s, the neighborhood was dangerous and disconnected. 

“Like other neighborhoods then, everybody was going to work, coming home, going in the house, and nobody knew each other on the block,” said Parlier. “So it was, it was a hard neighborhood to organize, and people just didn’t want to get to know each other.”

He also remembers when neighbors were not connected and they had to deal with empty homes, vacant lots, and a rising crime rate. But one small act sparked a neighborhood wide change. Parlier and his partner began gardening in their front yard. 

Soon two children from across the street became interested in Allen’s garden and would cross the street to spend time with him. 

 “They didn’t follow the rules,” Parlier recounted to us with a smile. It wasn’t long till these kids were gardening alongside Allen and his partner, creating an unlikely friendship 

 “So, we became friends. Their parents didn’t speak much English, but they wanted to garden. We didn’t have any more sunny space,” Parlier recalled. “Our neighbors said, ‘use our front yard if we don’t have to mow.’ We started doing that. We thought that was a little strange, because at that time, every front lawn everywhere was a golf course. Nobody was doing anything creative. It was just all bush, bush, bush and lawn and a few trees, but most of the trees had gone away by then. And so, we start gardening in the front yard, and people started coming over.” 

This concept of front yard gardening was practically unheard of at the time. Now you can drive through the city and see a variety of landscaping including sustainable lawns, food yielding beds, native plants, and alternative turfs. But back then, Allen’s gardens were groundbreaking for Oklahoma City. And this fresh new way of caring for residential areas caught his neighbors’ attention. 

“I guess we felt safe because it was little kids and me and my spouse gardening in yards,” Parlier told us, “And they walk by say, ‘What is this? What are you on here?  Oh, I like to eat that.’  And then other people felt the mission to start gardening, especially the Vietnamese folks. They start gardening every inch of their front yard because they were just a few years away from having lived in Vietnam, where that was what you do. You grow stuff right where you live, and then we were learning from each other…so we started building relationships. And in that, we discovered two things. One is that front yard gardening is a great model to get to know your neighbors for community organizing, and that we all speak food.”

Parlier watched the neighborhood organize rapidly, garden by garden. 

“It went from a block where nobody knew each other, to a block where everybody knew each other and was sharing life together,” Allen said. “And that’s really what neighboring is all about at its core, sharing life together with your neighbors.”

Through this act of gardening and neighboring, Central Park saw a steep decline in crime in the neighborhood. People felt safe spending time outside, they held regular block parties in the street and even had an annual Halloween party where they shut the street down for children to trick or treat. Parlier recounted that after a decade of these events and community organizing, you could see the stark difference in the neighborhood. This was and remains a place where community thrives. 

Following their success with front yard gardens, Allen presented an idea to the rest of the neighborhood: utilizing empty lots to create community gardens to increase access to gardening opportunities and opportunities for gardeners to collaborate.  

“And, you know, the response was, ‘Cool idea, but I don’t know who’s gonna do it and it can’t cost any money.’ And so, they said, ‘as long as you can do it and you can organize it, and it doesn’t cost us any money, then go for it.’”

And Allen went with it. He began a year-long project to get permission from the County and City to use the empty lots. They began on 4 empty lots, with the help of Oklahoma City Community Foundation and The Oklahoma County Extension Office. They began growing food on a larger scale, and this became Commonwealth Farms in 2011. But some neighbors were still concerned about teenagers in the neighborhood and surrounding schools vandalizing the community garden. Allen’s simple and effective solution was to invite youth to volunteer. 

“And so, it was our Neighborhood Association and Harding [Fine Arts] working together to create this youth group that provided an opportunity for student teenagers to do community service and learn about organic gardening and landscaping” Parlier said. 

 In addition to collaborating with Harding, Parlier worked with other schools, teenagers that were required to do community service, and kids in the neighborhood. This changed the ways that youth interacted with their community as well as the ways people in the neighborhood perceived them and what their expectations were. Allen reports that, “All of a sudden, we switched from a neighborhood that feared teenagers to a neighborhood where the landscaping was being run by the teenagers. And so, graffiti quit, you know, because to the kids, it was their neighborhood, and they were taking care of stuff.” By allowing teenagers to take ownership of the new agriculture space, Central Park expanded their reach in the community and began to truly build bridges instead of fences. This ethos is at the heart of Central Park and Commonwealth Farms. Since its inception Commonwealth has continued to grow while continuing to connect the neighborhood and community.