Remembering Barbara Quattro

We want to take a moment to remember Barbara Quattro, an Alief Community Legend, sometimes referred to as the unofficial mayor of Alief.  She passed away on August 8th, 2025.  She will be remembered for many things such as raising kids, helping with grandkids, participating as the chair of the Alief Super Neighborhood, organizing the planting of thousands of trees in Alief, helping to register voters, and pushing for the eventual Alief community center rebuild for decades, but we want to highlight what she did in regards to food access.  

Barbara moved down from West Virginia and Alaska in the late 1970’s, and she loved her new home down here in the Houston area.  She was a community organizer that wanted the best for her community here in Alief.  She was passionate about the community, and stayed on the cutting edge of ideas to help build a tighter knit one.  One of those ideas was community gardens, which she was one of the early supporters of in the Houston area (there were no community gardens in Houston in 1984).

Photo: Barbara Quattro with Kyle Frese on January 29, 2025 during the grand opening of the Barbara Quattro Alief Forest

With the idea of helping to build community, tackle food insecurity, and nutritional deficits, in the early 90’s she reached out to Bob Randall, co-founder of Urban Harvest, to get help starting a community garden in Alief.  With the help of a few others, no funding, and the approval from the park’s department, the community garden was started on a small piece of park land in a bayou flood zone.  It was there that they put together Alief's first community garden with only a few raised beds.  Starting and maintaining a community garden comes with many challenges, and this one did not make it.  Fortunately, Barbara was a very persistent person with a vision, and years later, she decided to try again.  

This time around Barbara worked with Karen Lopper and the International District in coordination with Alief ISD to gain access to land, funding, and start the modern day Alief Community Garden in the fall of 2011.  They did this after renewed inspiration from seeing the Westbury community garden and they wanted to try to bring something like that to their home community of Alief.  With the help of people like Bob Randall and Ray Sher from Urban Harvest, Gus Munoz, and about 50 other community members from Alief, they were able to begin to build it out.  The garden started with about 20 beds for community members and as of August 2025, is now at 85 beds with the goal of hitting 100 by the end of 2025.  These beds allow community members access to about 100 square feet of growing space (you can grow a lot in that much space!) for a very reasonable monthly rate and some volunteer time.  This allows people with little or no access to land a place to grow food in community, learn from others around them, beautify the space, and have a good time doing it.  

Barbara recruited community members of all ages and backgrounds to join.  She managed key pieces to keep a community garden together such as the tools, the beds, sign-ups, volunteering, grant writing, irrigation, etc.  She even attempted to start a farmer’s market at the community garden.      

In late 2020 / early 2021, Barbara worked with Lawrence Edwards, Kyle Frese, and about 20-30 Alief High School volunteers as an initiative coming out of a Complete Communities meeting to plant 25 fruit trees at the Alief Community Garden.  These trees have since begun to bear fruit and provide food for the community.  Trees for Houston was generous enough to donate these trees, and Urban Harvest was generous enough to help provide additional funding to begin the transformation of this space from a traditional orchard into a food forest using permaculture principles.

At almost exactly the same time in 2020/2021, Shamba Ya Amani (Farm of Peace in Swahili) began adjacent to the Alief Community Garden.  Shamba provided a place for refugee women to farm on a ½ acre plot.  Although Barbara may not have been directly involved in this project, she was an advocate for their work and met with Kim Meyer occasionally to go over plans, ideas, and dreams for the future. 

Barbara was a passionate and inspired person who led an ambitious and persistent journey in Alief to help bring the community together in a positive way, and food accessibility was a big part of that mission.  She will be remembered for this along with the numerous contributions she made to help develop the Alief Community.  In remembrance of her, we hope that you will join us in planting out one food producing plant at your home, whether that is a small herb in a pot in the window sill, or a fruit tree in the backyard.  Also, please consider donating your time to help keep the Alief Community Garden thriving!  We luckily have a wonderful young woman named Casey Sheek that has taken over as the Alief Community Garden Manager.  If you would like to volunteer to help out, she can be reached at cmsheek@gmail.com.