Diane Moss is executive director of Project New Village, a nonprofit that recently broke ground on its first community garden in Mount Hope. | Photo Credit: Sam Hodgson
By Adrian Florido
For more than 20 years, Diane Moss ran a teen pregnancy prevention program in southeastern San Diego’s low income, largely African-American and Latino neighborhoods.
But in the last few years, a new trend among teens presented a professional hurdle she wasn’t sure she could overcome. They were using cell phones to send sexually explicit messages or photos of themselves to friends, a phenomenon known as sexting.
“I’m in my early 50s. I’m not a technological person, and I couldn’t come up with a curriculum-based answer to that. I knew that perhaps it was time to do some other work,” she said.
So she started exploring. One day in September 2008, she went to a workshop in City Heights where local food advocates were discussing their burgeoning efforts to turn vacant lots into community gardens and to start farmers markets to increase fresh food access in low-income neighborhoods.
There was no one from southeastern San Diego at that workshop, and few ethnic minorities, Moss recalled. She realized she had found a new calling.
Click here to read a Q&A with Moss, in which she discusses the motivations and challenges behind introducing southeastern San Diego to urban agriculture. She explains the difficulty of getting minority residents involved in community gardens, pointing to City Heights’ own refugee paradox.