Renaissance in Overtown
Professor, Students Cultivate Overtown Gardens and Community Pride

Marvin Dunn’s brother, LeVon Dunn, has been assisting in the Community Gardens since the project began.

Roses, strawberries and mulberry trees all bloom in Psychology Professor Marvin Dunn's Community Gardens in the heart of Overtown, one of Miami 's historically black neighborhoods. When you stroll through the gardens, what you see are fiery bougainvillea, azure plumbago clusters and sunny golden shrimp. What you feel is cheered, optimistic, inspired.

Fostering those positive feelings was the idea six years ago when Dunn dreamed up the gardens to engage his Community Psychology students in public service. Students have the option of either working in the gardens for four weekends or writing a paper. On any given Saturday or Sunday, 20 to 30 FIU students are planting, weeding, pruning and picking up trash in the gardens.

"My feeling was the students should give something to the community. You shouldn't just take away a degree from FIU and not get your hands dirty," Dunn said. "Almost nobody chooses to do the paper."

Dunn, one of FIU's founding faculty members and chairperson of the Psychology Department, lived in Overtown in the 1950s as a child. He recalls the days when the mulberry trees lined all the streets and he and his friends would delight in squishing the fruit to a purple splatter on the sidewalk. He also remembers the decision in the mid-1950s to build a freeway through Overtown.

"This is what killed Overtown," Dunn said. "When I-95 came through it divided Overtown in half. It displaced many people. It didn't have to happen."

Today, Dunn does his part to rebuild Overtown's sense of unity and community pride, and he speaks of the renaissance of Overtown." Several foundations have recently become interested in investing in Overtown redevelopment. The gardens have grown over the years and now cover about 15 acres of public land throughout the neighborhood. What were once abandoned, littered lots are now blooming with flowers, vegetables, bushes and trees. In the main gardens, across the street from the Overtown Youth Center, the word OVERTOWN is spelled out in plumbago bushes visible from the freeway.

Dunn and his students have cleaned up the once dingy, filthy area under the freeway and painted the beams Easter egg blues, greens and yellows. Every weekend, the students clean up trash, most of which rains down on the neighborhood from the freeway above. The biggest problem they have, Dunn says, is people picking the roses.

"People are very protective of the gardens," Dunn said. "Overtown is improving. I wouldn't have said that a year ago. The gardens are part of the renaissance of the community."

Students say the weekend work is exhausting but rewarding. "People say, 'Hey girls, good job,'" said Melissa Hernandez, a senior Psychology major. "You're helping the community, trying to get it cleaned up."

At the end of a day of workingin the gardens, said senior Jackie Garcia, "you get a good feeling. We get a lot done. We give back to the community."

Dunn is well known in Overtown, a community of 9,000, many of them single mothers. Driving around the neighborhood, Dunn stops often, waving to people, shaking hands and giving hugs. But he too gets his hands dirty with the students. It's work he is happy to do.

When he retires at the end of the 2005-2006 academic year, care of the gardens will be handled by Roots in the City, a non-profit foundation he established that employs people from the neighborhood to maintain the garden. Dunn's vision is to prepare the individuals, some of whom have prison records or past addiction problems, for steady work in Miami 's landscaping industry.

It's unlikely Dunn's retirement from FIU will mean retirement from the gardens.

"I'd rather do this than anything else," Dunn said. "It's my therapy. It makes me feel like I have contributed something."