Coffee Creek Volunteer Receives Fellowship to Expand Garden, Sustainability at Prison

For five weeks a year, Debbie Rutt goes to prison.

Not as a sentence for a crime, but because three years ago Rutt planted a garden in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville to provide the female inmates there with the opportunity to learn how to plant, grow and harvest their own food.

The garden takes up about 6,000 square feet within the prison walls, but with help from a $10,000 fellowship Rutt recently received, she hopes to double the space, add a greenhouse and add sustainable measures for both the garden and the prison.

Rutt is one of 40 people awarded the 2011 Together Green Fellowship, co-sponsored by Toyota and the National Audubon Society. She applied for the fellowship with the support of Northwest Portland’s Audubon Society of Portland.

The fellowship will give her $10,000 to put toward expanding Coffee Creek’s organic garden, adding a system that catches rainfall for irrigation and creating a composting program that will use food waste from the prison’s kitchen.