Our Mission
The mission of the Redondo Beach Community Gardens (RBCG) is to provide residents of Redondo Beach with a space to grow food, build community, reduce food insecurity, and practice sustainable and healthy living.
After almost two years of organizing, planning and outreach, we are ready to dig our hands into the ground to realize our shared vision to establish the first community garden for Redondo Beach.
Members of the RBCG committee have extensive experience working with cities, managing nonprofits, coordinating public health programs, teaching students, and running urban farms and community gardens.
We have thoughtfully incorporated the guidance of city council members, city staff, community leaders, and thriving community garden programs in nearby cities to lay the groundwork for success.
Redondo Beach Community Garden Committee
Angela Klipp - RBCG Garden Manager
Angela has previously started a community garden and an urban farm in Chicago, IL. She moved to Redondo Beach in 2019 and has been hungry to share her passion for food and community ever since! When not gardening you can usually find her on her bike or with her partner, 2 cats or 100 worm pets.
Joined: Summer 2021
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: Carrots! They always feel like a mystery until you pull their tops and they reveal themselves like a debutante at a ball.
Why are community gardens important? I joined my first community garden while in graduate school or urban public policy and was amazed at the empowerment that comes from creating your own food. It inspired me to find other ways to take control of the space around me. And sharing that empowerment with others is what builds a robust community.
Brianna Egan - RBCG Chair-at-Large, UC Master Gardener
Brianna began the Redondo Beach Community Garden effort in 2020 with Mara Lang and Barbara Epstein, realizing a long-time vision for a community garden in the city. She was born and raised in Redondo Beach and graduated from RUHS in 2012. Currently, she is a medical student at Loma Linda University where she completed her MPH in Public Health Nutrition. She volunteers as a UC Master Gardener and has led the RBCG effort in various capacities. Brianna finds that the best people in life are gardeners and farmers and tries to cultivate a way of life centered around supporting healthy people, healthy communities, and a healthy planet. She keeps a home garden in Redondo and is especially proud of her perennial kale and artichoke plants as well as her compost and rainwater catchment systems.
Joined: Summer 2020
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: Sweet potato! They have lovely deep green vines that you can cook up in a quick sauté, and I'm always so delighted by finding potato tubers under the soil when I harvest at the end of summer.
Why are community gardens important? Community gardens are the ultimate form of community resilience and interdependence. Not only are you growing food for yourself and your community, you are also growing relationships and connections to the soil, to each other, and to the local ecosystem in which you are one small part.
Mara Lang - SBPC Vice President, RBCG City/Nonprofit Liaison & Strategist
Mara Lang has lived in Redondo Beach for over 12 years with her two children and husband. Her family has a small business that serves the South Bay and she has become very invested in the betterment of this community mostly through volunteering. She comes to this work through the UCLA English Department and a background in TV Commercial production, and has been able to use her project management and communication proficiency to support and further local environmental causes she’s most passionate about like trees, native habitat, and most recently a community garden for Redondo Beach. Investing time and resources in her immediate community has been an incredibly rewarding endeavor. She is excited to see what is possible and who she will meet along the way.
Joined: Summer 2020
Barbara Epstein - SBPC Advisory Board Member, RBCG City/Nonprofit Liaison & Strategist
Barbara Epstein inherited her family’s love for nature and farming. Preservation of special places has always been a high priority. She moved to Palos Verdes with her husband and young family in 1972 so they could have horses and a little farm. Barbara founded the Palos Verdes Peninsula Horsemen’s Association and taught horsemanship. She finished college and became a classroom teacher, where environmental studies, outdoor field trips to Palos Verdes, school gardening, and hatching chicks were her students’ favorites. She volunteered with PVP Land Conservancy, Madrona Marsh, and Environmental Priorities Network. She joined the South Bay Parkland Conservancy after moving to Redondo Beach in 2012, helping with restoring Wilderness Park, and advocating for the AES Wetlands Historic Park and the Edison Corridor Green Belt. Helping to create Community Gardens in Redondo Beach has been a very exciting new endeavor.
Joined: Summer 2020
Menya Cole - RBCG Community Partnerships
Menya Cole is a Los Angeles educator and a Redondo Beach resident. She has long desired for a community garden in Redondo Beach and came to this project via her once-a-month Google searches to see whether a community garden had been started in Redondo. She enjoys small space gardening with her daughter, a student at Redondo Union High School. She looks forward to bringing her background as an educator working in schools to help bridge partnerships between the Redondo Beach Community Garden with local schools and community organizations.
Joined: Winter 2021
Steve Takemoto - RBCG Community Partnerships
Steve has lived in Redondo Beach for the past 30 years and recently retired from a career in medical research at UCLA and UC San Francisco. While in San Francisco, he volunteered at the Golden Gate Park nursery greenhouse where he gained experience germinating and propagating seedlings and maintaining garden plots. For the past three years, he has attempted to grow various vegetables from seed. He is learning how the sandy soil, watering frequency, sunlight exposure, and garden insects pose gardening challenges and has experienced varied success coaxing seedlings to fruit-bearing plants.
Joined: Summer 2021
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: Zucchini. It's easy and very productive.
Why are community gardens important? I'd like to work with neighbors to share the experience and opportunity to cultivate vegetables and expand the availability of community gardens across the city.
Ginny Weinert - RBCG Community Partnerships
Ginny canvases for funds from both cities and local corporations. Ginny helps the lead team to manage and seek out corporate grants and funds for other large projects.
Joined: Spring 2022
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: Tomatoes because they are the best when you can eat it fresh off the vine!
Why are community gardens important? Community gardens are important because they provide people to meet their fellow neighbors and build strong relationships.
Carl Leach - RBCG Operations
I came from a large family and have lived in Redondo Beach most of my life. My love of the natural world comes from my family’s roots in the farmlands of Ventura County and my mother, who would take all nine of us kids in the station wagon to the beach or parklands. I love nature so much that I made it my life mission to help save her. After El Camino College, I started as a custodian at South Bay Union High School District and later MBUSD, and eventually worked my way to Director of Maintenance & Operations at MBUSD. I spent many years as sponsor of the Mira Costa HS Ecology Club and was lucky to work with teachers, students, and parents to make a difference. Along the way I met the love of my life, Lynn Riley, who works as a physical therapist to improve people’s health and lives. I retired in 2009. In my third chapter of life, I volunteer with South Bay Parkland Conservancy and the community garden to save native pollinators and teach people about organic gardening.
Joined: Winter 2022
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: I love to grow tomatoes, bell peppers, and basil.
Why are community gardens important? Community gardens provide a space where people who do not have garden space can grow organic food. Well-done community gardens also provide fellowship for gathering like-minded people to share their knowledge and food. As Thomas Jefferson said, “No occupation is so delightful as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.”
Ami Brasili - RBCG Social Media & Operations
I have had an opportunity, at a young age, to work in a bed and breakfast in the countryside of France where we cooked farm to table. After college I explored multiple opportunities with smaller local farms. Before I had my son 8 years ago, I was on my second harvest in a work/live farm on the central coast of California. I’m the 2022-2023 school year PTA Board Representative for LiveWell Kids program at Madison Elementary, which includes the garden program. I’m lucky enough to have a small 3 tier garden bed and multiple potted fruits and plants. I love growing from food (cuttings, seeding, etc) and propagation of currently thriving plants. Gardening has helped me be a better friend and neighbor, learn to notice details, and at times saved my sanity. As a mother, it’s Important to me that my son knows where his food comes from, be a part of the experience, and learn to nurture.
Joined: Spring 2022
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: My favorite veggies to grow are kale and carrots and favorite fruits are blueberries! They are all just easy to take care of and we eat them constantly!
Why are community gardens important? Community gardens help to provide a stable food source, provide real life skills and offer a place for community to come together.
Christine Ng - RBCG Membership Management
Christine recently took early retirement in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. She began her career by graduating early from college to a software engineering job in the aerospace industry. During her working years, Christine married her husband, earned a master degree, bought two houses in North Redondo, and raised two children.
Participating in community service activities is part of Christine’s DNA. She served as the registrar in South Bay Chinese School for seven years, taught Junior Achievement, and chaperoned the Mira Costa marching band, where she was head chaperone for one year. Christine has also been a member of the UCLA Parents’ Council Leadership and Emeriti Leadership. She volunteered with BCHD, helping with COVID-19 vaccinations and Zumba classes. In 2022, she fostered two dogs for Rovers Retreat. Christine is excited to participate in the first community garden for Redondo Beach.
Joined: Winter 2021
Fav fruit/vegetable to grow: My favorite plants are the Passion Fruit vine and the Dragon Fruit cactus. Both plants produce beautiful exotic flowers and highly fragrant fruits. One night when I came home late, my car’s headlight happened to shine on a huge white dragon fruit flower. I felt the special privilege of being greeted by a fleeting beauty because this flower only opens for one night.
Why are community gardens important? Community gardens are great places for neighbors to hang out in nature while producing food. They nourish the soul and the body.
Our Values
We value placemaking.
We seek to create community gardens throughout Redondo Beach that serve as vibrant neighborhood hubs for place-based learning and that establish a connection to the land, its history, and our role in its regeneration and caretaking. We recognize that we reside, gather, and cultivate food on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Tongva/Gabrieleño nation.
We value inclusivity.
We encourage cooperation and relationship-building among our volunteers and members spanning generations and cultures. We strive for an economic- and racially-diverse membership with a culture of respect, awareness, and celebration. See DEI statement for more.
We value resource-sharing.
We seek to learn and share local food-growing knowledge, seeds, and harvests among our members and the community at-large to support a strong local food system and food security. This is embodied in our Giving Garden program, plot scholarships, newsletters, community workshops, and web content.
We value sustainability & community health.
For our health and the health of the planet, we follow organic growing principles. We do not allow for the use of synthetic agrochemicals (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides) anywhere in the gardens.
Building on this, we promote soil health and ecosystem regeneration in many ways such as our community compost system, native/pollinator plants, and deep mulching. We seek to use our natural resources wisely.
Caring for the land and our health goes hand-in-hand: Our gardens provide nutritious foods and boost mental and physical health for our community.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
Our Redondo Beach Community Garden Leadership Team crafted this statement to lay the groundwork for an inclusive and diverse garden community.
Land Acknowledgment
Redondo Beach Community Gardens (RBCG) recognizes that we reside, gather, and cultivate food on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Tongva/Gabrieleño nation. We honor the Tongva/Gabrieleño peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles Basin) and Ongoovanga (Redondo Beach) and their ancestors (Honuukvetam), elders (‘Ahiihirom), and relatives (‘Eyoohiinkem) still living today. We carry deep respect for their connection to the land and foodshed and recognize that most of us are relative newcomers to this place we call home. We seek to steward and care for the land by honoring indigenous principles and leadership in our work.
Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
RBCG is committed to upholding the values of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our programs and our community. We recognize a painful history in the last three centuries in the South Bay region of Los Angeles of exploitation, land theft, and racial exclusion—from Spanish colonization, to Alien Land Laws and forced internment, to eminent domain and redlining—resulting in patterns of injustice and disparity. At the same time, we uphold the resilience and the beautiful heritage in Redondo Beach & the South Bay of Japanese-American farmers and nurserypeople, Black business owners and community leaders, and Latinx agricultural and landscaping entrepreneurs. We are committed to creating a community garden that honors this heritage by strengthening our local food system and foodshed and promoting the flourishing of people of all races, genders, ages, orientations, disabilities, and ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds.
In the spirit of community care, we seek to uplift all who step foot in our gardens or eats food grown from the gardens:
We strive to promote sustainability, climate resilience, and regenerative stewardship of our natural resources through our values and programs.
We strive to share our resources abundantly, and plan to do so through the ongoing work of our Giving Garden program for food-insecure households and through open garden workshops and workdays promoting knowledge-sharing and community-building.
We strive for a racially- and economically-diverse membership and plan to do so by offering plot scholarships and fostering a culture of intercultural celebration and appreciation.
We seek to create community partnerships with small businesses and organizations that share these values and are committed to diversity and inclusion in Redondo Beach and the South Bay.
We recognize that our commitment to these principles is a continuous and dynamic process of learning and accountability.
We will not tolerate racism, intolerance, discrimination, or hate of any kind towards any member, guest, volunteer, or leadership team member of RBCG. Thank you for joining us in a commitment to these principles.
(Updated Aug. 2022, BE/MC)