Planting New Life: Alma Backyard Farms Cultivates Healing and Second Chances
In the urban landscape of Compton, tucked among warehouses and auto repair shops, a lush and leafy oasis appears. This is Alma Backyard Farms, where Dennis Meman tends vegetables and flowers and thinks about how the seeds he plants grow into food which feed families.
He thinks about how nurturing life through farming can’t possibly make full amends for the life he took in a gang-related slaying.
But it’s what he can do now, after serving 27 years in prison for the crime. It’s how he can use his hands to heal rather than harm.
“Taking someone’s life is something you can never redo,” Meman said on a recent Sunday at the farm. “You can never bring it back. So how are you going to repay that? It has to be a lifetime of doing something good and sending something to the community, your family, the people around you.”
This is the work of transformation that unfolds every day at the farm – whose name, Alma, means “soul” in Spanish. Since the farm opened in 2013 with a mission to “reclaim lives, repurpose land and reimagine community,” Alma has trained more than 600 formerly incarcerated people in farming, construction, landscape and entrepreneurship. It now has a second site in San Pedro and has purchased land in Carson, with an eye toward a 2028 opening.
But Alma, which is supported by the California Community Foundation, is far more than a job training program.
“A lot of the work is more like soul work,” said Erika L. Cuellar, co-founder along with her husband, Richard Garcia. “Seeing yourself as a different person is at the core of our programming. If someone can’t view themselves or their hands as being able to build and heal and contribute, for us, it doesn’t really matter that they know construction or irrigation. It’s more that they understand they belong to a community and have a responsibility to help build it and feed it.”
Over the past year, the nonprofit has distributed more than 125,000 pounds of fresh organic produce to the community. On a recent visit, the Compton site was bursting with tall stalks of corn, vines of tomatoes, beds of lettuce, stalks of okra, even burro banana trees. The farmer’s market, with a pay-what-you-can model, drew a long line of visitors to tables laden with additional produce, some purchased from other organic suppliers, including peaches, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, broccoli, potatoes, garlic and ginger.
A busy food stand prepared chilaquiles and French toast, while Meman shifted to smoothie duties as he mixed up frosty concoctions of bananas, berries, kale and dates. Student interns passed around
samples of pesto and pickles, made with Alma’s organic produce. The market stand also sells baked goods, spice blends, soaps and hand-crafted ceramics. Overall, more than 12,000 people visit annually; Alma also hosts four food giveaways each year.
“We grow food to satisfy the deeper hunger the soul has for connection,” Garcia said.
Meilan Carter-Gilkey is a regular visitor to both the San Pedro and Compton sites who comes for that connection – to the land, to the community, to the farm’s social justice mission. It’s a family affair, with both her son and niece working at the farm in youth programs. She often spends three or four hours at the farm on Sundays, buying produce, listening to music, eating meals with family and friends and immersing herself in the uplifting beauty of nature. She loves watching children roam the farm, entranced by the plants and birds rather than electronic devices.
She’s seen her own teenage son, Mateo, grow tremendously in his youth program, which offers the farm experience to more than 600 students during the summer and school year.
During his Alma summer internship, she said, Mateo has learned about farming, teamwork, responsibility, customer service and how not to stereotype others. With his earnings, he was able to open his very first bank account – a big moment of pride for him, she said.
“For me, I feel like I’m supporting good,” said Carter-Gilkey, a San Pedro writer and poet. “I know that some people are formerly incarcerated, and I love supporting people starting their lives over. And I love the community part – people can just sit here and hang out and talk and eat.”
Alma’s roots reach back more than two decades to Garcia’s years as a Catholic seminary student living and working at Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights with Jesuit priests Greg Boyle and Michael Kennedy. Through them, he began working with formerly incarcerated people at the church and at Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles-based gang intervention and rehabilitation nonprofit. Garcia began mini-farms in the area to increase fresh food supplies and saw new awakenings among some of the homies who helped out.
“That’s where I noticed that touching dirt had its magic,” Garcia said. The work allowed people to process life, to see that transplanting seedlings into new soil required care and attention – as they did moving into a new environment after incarceration.
The pivotal moment came when one homegirl, a Boyle Heights gang member, brought new seedlings to the Dolores Mission mini-farm located on the same street where she had once planned a drive-by shooting.
“I can’t believe I’m planting new life where I was going to take it,” she told Garcia.
Those words stayed in Garcia’s heart like scripture, he said, forming his vision for Alma.
The journey hasn’t always been easy. The farm staff deal with break-ins and thefts. Negotiations with landlords can be tricky – one reason Alma decided to purchase its own land in Carson, which Garcia said he hopes can allow people to enjoy it for generations. He and Cuellar also bought a 20-acre grove in De Luz, northwest of Temecula, and are leasing five acres back to Alma to increase the capacity to grow food.
Not all trainees work out; some struggle after the program while others have been deported. And there is always a scramble for funds to keep the enterprise going, especially with growing demand for food. The cost of fruits and vegetables in Los Angeles has surged by 31% since 2019 and by 9.4% in the last year alone, according to federal data.
But the farm continues to offer repair and restoration, rooted in the belief that no life is wasted and that communities can be reimagined as spaces where people and plants can thrive.
Meman’s journey has come full circle after encountering Alma. A native of the Philippines who fell in with a gang as a young boy after his family moved to Hawaii, then Los Angeles, Meman is not only trying to make amends with his work as an associate farm manager here. He recently revisited his hometown in the Philippines and has begun sponsoring donations of medical supplies to the community there. He said Alma has helped him understand the power of good works and community building and he is trying to pay that forward.
Richard Soriano says the farm community has wrapped him in care and support as he struggles to recover from PTSD after witnessing terrible violence during 19 years in prison for robbery and drug offenses.
Small miracles of nature, like seeing new squash nestled beneath broad leaves, amaze him. A flock of quail delights him as he gathers small eggs from their pen. He feels connected to the abundant life around him, apologizing to the plants as he plucks them out of the ground. He feels he belongs, with team activities like the group huddle that begins each day with announcements and an Alma chant. It’s a space of healing while he works to qualify for a construction labor union.
“This place has kept me grounded,” he said. “They make you feel like family. I just love it here.”
– Teresa Watanabe
