Sustainable GARDENS EDUCATION
Students, along with their families sustained their engagement in the program, while lead and assistant teachers facilitated learning, exploring, weeding, watering and eating from the garden.
Gold Seed
GOLD SEED’s objective is to provide a whole-systems, garden learning and awareness raising analysis with specific aim to calendar and record the various gardens education and community garden stewardship initiatives. Evolving as three garden learning branches, Gold Seed is the central branch aimed at stabilizing the relationship with time, volunteers, resources and sustainable garden design. Our aim is to orchestrate these four strategies via the GOLD Gardens Education Program:
- Network and develop a creative vision for facilitating garden curriculum development.
- Build alliances and work to train a contingent of volunteer garden educators.
- Create a sustainable community gardens calendar for planting and harvest dates.
- Connect with the structures of the other two branches.
GOLD STAR
Gold Star Garden Enrichment is modeled to grow garden champions by engaging youth and their families in a season-long learning experience that emphasizes natural and affordable kitchen garden techniques, nutrition and life-long wellness. The aim is to offer a diverse array of hands-on learning and leadership activities that are individually tailored to the need of each garden, as well how cross-pollination can occur between garden projects.
GOLD HEART
GOLD HEART is a community food project that is focused on guiding our regional community on the road to health, self-reliance and sustainability, where community teams are converging throughout the Willamette Valley to eat and live gardens, grow organic, share harvest and feed the hungry. Evolving out of GOLD HEART is the vision of an “Edible Cities Initiative”— a web of community food systems that are modeled innovatively, and that are rooted in the act of growing organic and learning through Health, Education and the ARTS. As a community food project, we envision individuals instilling a garden ethic through local and regional garden workshops, work-parties, harvest and seed swaps, tool libraries and other community building, awareness raising events. It is the growth that happens in the garden, both plant and people; that Marion Polk Food Share intends to empower community resources around the Sustainable Community Gardens Program.