On Bread & Roses, and Bass Clarinets: Why BC Achievement Foundation Community Awardee Valerie Murray Inspires Me

Two years ago on May 10, I sat with Valerie Murray early in the morning as Government House was getting ready to welcome the 2022 BC Achievement Community Award recipients later that afternoon.? Valerie is the Head Gardener for Friends of Government House Garden Society and is one of the founding members of Breakfast2Music. She is one the twenty 2020 recipients of the Community Award. We managed to find a bench near the main gate. I was struck by the number of people who were waving at her as they made their way through the pathway.

Valerie:? I’ve got 400 Friends of Government House Garden Society, and half of them volunteer in the garden, so yeah, I’ve got lots of friends here, you might see quite a few of them go by. I was surprised to be honoured with this because there are so many people that do so much here and there’s so many people that have done so much over the last two years during COVID, I was very humbled - but on behalf of all the volunteer gardeners in all over the province that do so much to beautify and welcome visitors to all these public gardens, I accept it on their behalf, I know for sure Victoria would not look the same if it did not have the amount of gardeners that work here. I found that especially during COVID, when people weren’t doing a lot of social things, being outside was on thing, being in nature was one thing, but it really fed people to have this as a resource, we saw way more people come, I thought that there may not be as many volunteers, but there was more volunteers, because it was an outdoor activity that they could do, and enjoy nature and enjoy each other’s company and retain those social connections - and so that was super important

Dom: When you speak of connections, can you sort of tell me the role of youth, how does it intersect with your role as head gardener?

Valerie: The other hat that I wear is raising funds for breakfast and music programs in public schools.

Do you know the expression bread and roses?

It was almost like a socialist rallying cry, bread for the people and roses too – and bread was the security, food security, roof over your head, and your basic needs met – but even someone as famous as George Orwell said ‘you need roses too’ - roses feed the soul, the bread feeds the body, and roses is the education, is the music, is the art, is the culture, and you need both of those things – so my other hat which I do in my spare time with a small group of women is raise money for school breakfasts and for music programs in schools, and it always seems like whenever there’s cutbacks in the school, and this happened just this year, the school board who has to balance their budget looks at what needs to go, and the first thing that seems to go is the music programs, the arts – and there was a famous quote by Winston Churchill when asked during the war whether money should be cut back for the arts, he said, ‘why are we fighting war if it isn’t to support our culture?’ and that’s a big thought, so we used to have small fundraisers before COVID, we had to change what we were doing and that was good because we had to look for other sources in the community and look towards businesses, and I got money from local developers, we applied to different foundations, we just had to be more creative in not bringing people together and do fundraisers in the same way but asking for donations, there was a much higher level of awareness for social justice and inequality. We just found other ways to do that, and we didn’t have to tell the story about food insecurity because it was in the newspapers, there was a cry about food banks, there was a loss of jobs, I think people were more generous than ever especially in that first year.

Dom: April, May, June it started to ramp up, people felt it.

Valerie: They really did, so hopefully that awareness will remain, but what we do with our Breakfast 2 Music program is work directly with the schools, we found out through our project that it’s often the teachers to apply for extra money, they’re filling out the grant forms, they’re doing that stuff, they already have way too much on their plates.

Dom: My daughter is a high school teacher, I hear the stories.

Valerie – When they do get money, the teachers are the ones that go out to COSTCO and find the food on their own time, because they know if the kids are hungry and falling asleep in the classroom they can’t think, and if they can’t think, they have behavioural problems, and social things, we know that there’s so many social problems, we can’t begin to only put a Band-Aid? on adults who have grown up with a disadvantaged upbringing – but to, all of us are moms in the group, we sort of feel like ‘get the kids to school, encourage them to come to school because there’s a breakfast program, then when they’re there, you know having food in their stomach, it gives them energy, clarity, I mean there’s that expression – another expression that I like to quote, ‘hangry - when you’re hangry – how can you do schoolwork when you’re hangry?’ – we work with the teachers, we’ve been writing grants to different organizations, we just got a grant from The Grocery Foundation for 10,000 dollars, which was great, but it takes time to write the grants, and then it also takes time to write to the schools and build relationships with the different teachers, they get money from local Rotary Clubs, we know we’re not the only group supporting this, they get money from so many different groups, because we’re small, we look at the overview of the whole thing and try to fill the gaps, we don’t take responsibility for all, but sometimes 5000 dollars here or 7000 dollars there really helps fill those gaps, but it’s the volunteer time that we take to fill that (gap) – and we’ve got even more to do next year with music, I don’t know what we’re going to do about music.

This year we raised funds for

we bought an instrument for one of the school we bought a bass clarinet,

We’ve bought other instruments in the past, we’ve paid for individual coaching lessons so that students from UVIC we would pay music students from UVIC who could use a little extra cash, to come over to some of these schools and do individual coaching and we find that - we ask the teachers ‘what’s the best use of this little bit of extra money’ -? and they said that if they could - in a band, if you can get a few people that are especially good, and you listen to people on either side of you and that makes the whole band improve because they sort of have leaders within the band…are you a musician?

Dom: I appreciate music as much as I can, of course.

Valerie: Well, music teaches, I mean it’s culture, it’s the love of music for your whole life, but it’s also again a social thing, you learn to listen to being on a team, learning to listen to what’s going on either side of you, to have to fit into, it’s very sort of a socializing thing, as well as – some kids, everybody needs a different reason to sort of stay engaged in school, for a lot of kids it’s sports, and I know for one of my kids, definitely, he was not a jock, but music really helped him all through school, it’s just another layer of things that we should all be able to experience as we’re growing up.

Dom: So it’s been a year and a bit, you’re still at it, sounds like it, the passion in your eyes is there, COVID’s made it almost like a – you have a heightened sense of we’ve got to keep going at this – how has life changed after your recognition?

Valerie: My life? I don’t know if my life has really changed so much, I’m aware of – I do leadership in a different way, maybe, I don’t know?

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Dom: You lead by service

Valerie: I lead by service but I also lead by encouraging other people to step up, and - what I do in this garden is what maybe I like to do in the community – is to give person confidence for the opportunities to see what their own skills are, and sort of be working more in the back – do I lead from behind – I don’t know, you know what I mean, everyone has different leadership skills.

Dom: In my case, I’m the first one in and the last one out, the last one to go home, I will do what’s necessary, and during COVID, because a lot of volunteers had their own personal priorities to tend to, I took over, just did it, it’s part of it, you do everything, servant leadership, and I suspect that in your case - the blooming flowers in the garden are so tangible, that when they see that – you’ve got to appreciate the loving hands, the vision, the heart of Valerie, and so, why wouldn’t they come, not to put words into your mouth.

Valerie: It’s true, one of the things that’s wonderful about being in the garden is you can say ‘oh what a beautiful garden, and yes you can say isn’t nature beautiful’, you can step back – and you can be, it’s easier in the garden to kind of be the invisible hand, and when people come through this garden, you know it’s only Tuesday and Thursday mornings that you see volunteers in the garden, and the rest of the time it just seems like it happens magically, you’ll see a scurry of people here Tuesdays and Thursdays - to make it look effortless, and this is just done for you, and it’s our pleasure to do it for you, we don’t need applause, we don’t need recognition, we love to do it to keep ourselves connected, connected to each other, connected to the earth, and to feel like it’s a gift we give willingly, all these people that come in here, they just all sort of do it silently, that’s why it was embarrassing to receive this award, because it seemed...

Dom: You accepted it on behalf of all of your 400 friends.?

Valerie: I will accept it on behalf of everybody that worked so hard!

Dom: That award was given to you two years ago…two years ago, okay, so life hasn’t changed, you carried on.

Valerie: Life hasn’t changed, we just keep doing what we’re doing, there’s more people than ever are coming to the garden, there is more pressure on the music in the schools, that’s for sure and I am worried about that - it’s one thing buying an instrument and providing each coaching where needed but it’s totally different having millions cut and it is millions cut from the music program, and how do you deal with no middle school band to have a high school band if you don’t have a middle school band - you have to have that, how we do that going forward it may be approaching more private foundations, it’s the arts that have suffered more than any sort of business, the restaurants are starting to recover, and a lot of people can work from home, but the musicians and artists, they are out there providing this cultural space for us to share, and that they’ve really been hard hit, so I don’t know how we’re going to do that.

Dom: You know about the 2021 Mitchell Awardee is Amber Anderson, she’s a chef who provides food to Downtown Eastside community in Vancouver?? I’m going to chat with her about food security, hangry, I think that all makes sense, and so I get that part, so I’m going to move to my third question - in spite all the challenges, what gives you hope?

Valerie: I think that people when they didn’t have a lot of other indoor things that they did around in Victoria, a lot more people around here were walking more than ever walked here before, and using this place more, and feeling like it wasn’t just for their physical health, but for their mental health, and I love the expression ‘forest bathing’ so that you go in and appreciate – nature’s there, you have to make the effort to just expose yourself to it and be there, I’m just – any place you just sit and look in different direction, I’m just looking at those trees, people would come and just sit amongst the trees and feel connected, so hopefully, the things that I feel hopeful about is that more awareness about social justice and inequality, and how we can sort through that and work together to improve that and how we just have to find our connection again with nature and with other living quiet things, we don’t have to be loud, we have to find a quiet place with intent and let that place feed us so that the bread and roses, whether it’s bread that fills our soul, bread that fills our body and roses that feel our soul is – the two are linked together, it was only when I heard that expression, thinking how much both they dovetail, they do, so hopefully we’ll keep seeing the number of people in the garden, I thought the number of volunteers would drop off but it actually, we didn’t lose volunteers.

Dom: I’m envious of you, in 2020 we lost a significant number of our volunteers, and 2021, and 2022 I guess we’ve been working hard to rebuild what we lost, because in the scheme of things, Valerie, they’ve got their work, they’ve got their personal lives, so volunteering is sort of the third priority, but it makes you feel good but if there’s no bread on the table, if you can’t take care of your parents and children.

Valerie: Supporting music, going to live theatre, going to hear live music, being aware of what’s going on in your schools, what’s going on in your neighbourhood, the other thing that really rose to the forefront during COVID is community gardens, we had a COVID garden here, and we actually have a vegetable garden on site as well, and we have lots of volunteers in the vegetable garden, people really wanting to know how to be more self-sufficient, and raise their own food, and we give a portion of the food that we grow to the soup kitchen that’s in Victoria, because it looks like this is a government property, the volunteers actually buy all the plants here.

All the plants are purchased by the volunteers, we raise funds at Government House - the Friends raise money every year to buy plants and buy tools, and one of the ways we raise money is by selling our vegetables back to the volunteers, we have a nursery where we raise, we divide our plants, sell them down in the nursery, and that money, we’ve raised over 10,000 dollars last year, and the vegetable garden did as well to give back to gardeners to buy plants, so the province of British Columbia is not buying plants – the volunteers are giving you these plants, but we do have a school program that is on the site that’s called Growing Young Farmers, this group uses part of our property down below, and marches kids up from the local elementary schools, I think there has been a real rise in that – the City of Victoria has a new program that started – just before COVID, I think the year before COVID - called Get Growing Victoria, and they grow all kinds of vegetable seedlings and we are one of the distribution points, so the volunteers help distribute the plants, so people can come here and get vegetable starts for free and take them home to their gardens, and so the City of Victoria is doing that, but we partner with them, and people use us as one of the hubs, where they come and pick up their seedlings, so I think people are just aware – you know, being aware of what’s happening in your community, the community gardens, allotment gardens, people are more aware of that now that they ever have been, and I don’t know about us personally how people can help – but how they can help their community, you know it’s about helping your own community and you know, start small in the community where you live and grow from there, I guess, it’s not how they can help what we do here (Dom – the cause), but the bigger cause and thinking about your own backyard, your own community and that’s where we make the difference.

Dom: Who else inspires you Valerie?

Valerie: Over the last two years, the people that have inspired me the most, are actually not the gardeners, it’s the healthcare workers, it’s those people who just give and give and give, and are bone tired and show up for work the next day, under you know, I can’t complain about a little bit of rain or a cold day or gee, I should have put on an extra sweater when I came out when there’s people are out there on the front line doing, those are the people, the Bonnie Henrys, I mean, you know, oh my goodness, we see her because she lives in Victoria, we see her and you just want to talk to her and just thank her, but I just do it from a distance, but I know that she never gets in my mind enough applause for all the amazing things...

Dom: Except for her signature shoes?

Valerie: She does get applause for her shoes – but what a hard, tough gig, a very tough gig – so, anytime I feel cold and wet and tired in the garden, I think ‘I can go home and have a shower’, tomorrow’s another day, plants are forgiving, they’re going to come back, plants are great, gardens are forgiving, gardens feed you. You won’t believe, full page of notes plus a video, yesterday Steve Sorensen told me it’s his wife who gives him a lot of inspiration, he retired as Sooke’s Fire Chief, and she was determined to find him things to do – I’m chuckling about it. What I hear very loud and very clear, it’s okay to say ‘I’m accepting this on behalf of all volunteers’, because you know what, I did the same thing.

Valerie: It’s not about us.

After our chat, Valerie and I went on to visit a new garden. It was impressive to know that there are now 20 gardens in Government House. Ever the gracious host, one of her friends gifted me with a lovely bunch of flowers.?

I am looking forward to visiting her gardens next week.

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Dom Bautista is the 2020 Mitchell Laureate Community Awardee. His fellow awardees are listed here. Dom is the executive director of AC Friends of Court, a charity that helps BCians understand legal procedures, and helps in completing their forms. For free.