Meet the U.S. Army Veteran building a community garden at Veterans Community Project

Amaan, who had previously experienced homelessness after eight years in the military, is transforming the space as well as his own life in VCP Village.

U.S. Army Veteran Amaan smiles when he thinks back to how his grandmother would restore natural beauty to the world around her. Today, with a green thumb that he inherited from her, the Veterans Community Project resident is doing the same by transforming the field adjacent to his tiny home into a community garden.

“For me, that garden is my sanctuary outside of the sanctuary of my tiny home,” he says. “I get out there, feel the morning dew, smell the flowers and tomato vines, hear the buzzing bees... that’s like therapy for me. And through the fruits of my labor, I can feed my neighbors.”

Amaan began work on the garden this spring after moving into his 240-square-foot transitional home at Veterans Community Project. Today, it boasts a dozen varieties of tomatoes, an assortment of bell peppers, jalapenos, cucumbers, and more. Plus, colorful zinnias and blooming sunflowers.

He’ll tell you, though, that the garden’s not the only thing undergoing transformation. Before VCP, Amaan was among the 32,882 Veterans experiencing homelessness each night in the United States. In Amaan’s case, he slept on park benches and then “on a bed of gravel” behind a church. 

“When you’re homeless, life’s not day by day, it’s hour by hour,” he explains. “You don’t know the next time you get to eat or take a shower. If someone hands you a couple bucks, you assess whether you have the energy to make it to the gas station.”

Then adding, with a bit of a laugh, “And those birds are rude, man, waking you up at 5 a.m.”

Amaan, who served eight years in the Army as a radio transmissions and satellite communications operator, was already familiar with VCP before experiencing homelessness. But, in a different context, as he’d met with one of our founders several years prior in a professional capacity.

“I was hesitant to reach back out, you know,” he says, “fearful they’d be like, ‘What happened to you, man?’”

But eventually, Amaan says, “I set my pride aside and made that phone call.”

Within a couple of weeks, he moved into the Village. He remembers a warm reception from the VCP team. Opening the door to his tiny home. Seeing the fridge stocked with groceries. Hugging the welcome committee. Then sitting down on his bed in dead silence and “feeling this huge lump of gratitude.”

In the VCP program, Amaan’s primary goal has been focused on his mental health and physical fitness. He talks about the trauma of losing his mother as a 7-year-old and the instability and poverty that followed throughout his youth. He said that for years he found himself living inside a hardened shell, but since moving in that, “I have already developed a better sense of self.”

His secondary, yet important, goal has been to create and maintain financial stability for himself. He has an office job working for a magazine that helps fellow Veterans share their stories. It’s work he enjoys and that’s helping him build up savings in preparation for a transition to sustainable permanent housing.

In more ways than one, he’s planning out a future that takes him back to his outdoorsy roots. One of his favorite memories of his grandmother was how one summer she moved into a house with a concrete slab of a backyard. The next summer, it was a raised garden and an oasis.

The parallels are hard to miss. The community garden at VCP sits on a space that half a century ago was the tee box to a driving range (fun fact: we still find golf balls across the property) and more recently was a well-kept but underused space in the communal backyard of 49 tiny homes in which Veterans like Amaan are rebuilding their lives.

Looking ahead, Amaan hopes to hand the garden over to another resident who can build upon it. And personally, he reflects on how the past year has given him confidence toward his dream of one day having a farm of his own—he’s already looking into USDA programs to make it a reality.

“The positive feedback I have gotten about the garden has helped strengthen the sense of purpose I was developing when I came to VCP,” Amaan says.

Adding, “It’s confirmed for me that I am worth my weight in gold despite my position in society.”