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Inspired Magazine

Profiling world changers, eco-warriors, peace makers

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‘Gangsta Gardener’ Ron Finley is leading a movement<br />

in which people across the globe are transforming<br />

abandoned blocks, roadside verges and unloved pieces<br />

of vacant dirt into gardens and vegetable patches.<br />

The craze is not only beautifying forgotten areas but<br />

bringing people together, providing fresh produce in areas<br />

dominated by fast food and reminding people that they<br />

have the power to shape their own future.<br />

Travel across the skyline of Los Angeles,<br />

beyond the glitz of Hollywood, over the<br />

ghettos patrolled by hunch-shouldered<br />

youths, not far from the shopping strips jammed<br />

with fast food outlets where people groan with<br />

the weight of their own obesity, and descend into<br />

South Central LA.<br />

Here sits an unassuming house, amid a street<br />

of modest homes. Out the front, tending to the<br />

garden on his verge and chatting to his neighbour,<br />

is Ron Finley – an artist and fashion designer who<br />

has risen to fame as the ‘Gangsta Gardener’.<br />

Ron has led a movement in which people across<br />

the world are transforming abandoned areas into<br />

gardens. With shovel in hand they are turning<br />

forgotten blocks into vegetable patches and<br />

roadside verges into flowerbeds.<br />

But this movement is about more than gardens<br />

– it’s about bucking the system, empowering<br />

people to design life in the way they want it, about<br />

helping them to realise they don’t have to do<br />

things the way they’ve always been done.<br />

Ron says drive-through fast food outlets are<br />

killing more people than the drive-by shootings<br />

that dominate media headlines in his LA home. It’s<br />

the preventable diseases caused by poor diets that<br />

are bringing down the people of his neighbourhood.<br />

Imagine, he thought, if residents could take<br />

matters into their own hands. If they could plant<br />

their own food on forgotten patches of dirt?<br />

Left Ron has earned a name for himself as a ‘gangsta<br />

gardener’ after transforming abandoned pieces of dirt<br />

into vegetable gardens and colourful flowerbeds.

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