Jason O'Brien, My Own Back Yard (MOBY)
by MICHAEL GORDON
It all started with a phone call to city hall to remove an eyesore dumpster from the vacant lot beside his Grandview home. Jason O’Brien’s house at 11th and Commercial abuts the once-derelict city plot, which had attracted an unwanted flow of drug dealers, users, and uncontrolled garbage right behind the Broadway SkyTrain station. After gathering dozens of signatures from area residents who wanted the space cleaned up, the Vancouver designer was inspired to reclaim the site for a community garden. And, thus, a cheeky take on NIMBYism was born: MOBY (in My Own Back Yard).
Six figures in civic grant money later, O’Brien has organized MOBY into an unlikely cadre of volunteers who meet for Saturday work bees to haul, dig, and plant. A key fixture is the cob shed—a structure based on a traditional building method that mixes available materials of clay, sand, straw, and water. Kids and adults, young and old, roll up their pant legs and mix the materials with their feet, making a wonderful example for “jumping in with both feet” to improve one’s neighbourhood. Addicts are straightening out, neighbours are “mixing” for the first time, and the inner-city ecology-conscious are literally digging in for local action.
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