A rain garden was installed at the Dunbar Association in October 2009 as the first phase of a long term plan to incorporate green infrastructure at the facility with environmental education programs  and the creation of “green jobs”.  Approximately 800 square feet of the center’s front lawn was converted to rain garden under a joint grant between Atlantic States Legal Foundation (ASLF) and the Dunbar Association funded by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.  While ASLF and the Dunbar Association headed the project, multiple organizations collaborated to see the garden successfully constructed.

ASLF Landscape Designer Alex Shisler did the planning, analysis, and design of the rain garden.  Its intent is to not only reduce the amount of stormwater running off-site while being a social and aesthetic benefit, but to also be a highly visible, low maintenance, experimental demonstration project which will test uncertain parameters, such as vegetation success and the rerouting of Dunbar’s rain gutters from the storm drain to the garden. This project can be incorporated into a larger green infrastructure network in the future.  The rain garden’s location, shape, size, and planting choices were all carefully considered to reflect these goals in unison.

Hope 4 Us Housing, a local contractor, used the garden as a green component of a construction training program for under employed community members.  Approximately nine local residents hired under the program learned the concept of the garden and its construction in a classroom setting, then excavated it by hand and amended the soil by mixing in free municipal compost.  This was the first of what will hopefully be many job training initiatives in Syracuse centered on the construction of green infrastructure.

The planting and mulching of the garden was incorporated into a larger after school environmental education program at the Dunbar Association for students 10-13 years in age, taught by ASLFs Kerin Beth Rosen.  To learn about native plants and green infrastructure’s role in reducing pollution to the environment, the youth planted a wide variety of native trees and perennials selected by and purchased from the Phoenix Flower Farm.  Older students from Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Earth Corp program, with previous experience planting rain gardens, guided and assisted the younger students in proper planting methods.  The result of these efforts is a garden rich in its number and diversity of plants and trees which, with future monitoring, will indicate which plants do best in rain gardens in our geographically unique ecosystems.    

Many important lessons have, and will be, learned through the construction of this rain garden.  It is our hope that it will inspire local citizens and their governments to build better and more rain gardens in the future.  It is, however, only a jumping off point from which there is still much work to be done; it looks as if we are off to a good start.