Sustainable GARDENS EDUCATION
"Grow Organic, Learn Deep"
In 2009, Marion Polk Food Share piloted a program entitled, GOLD STAR - “Grow Organic, Learn Deep”. Designed for students in third through seventh grades, the program offered a season long, hands-on learning experience in five neighborhood gardens located strategically throughout Salem.
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. A total of 150 classes were offered at the five locations, with both the youth and the community benefiting from the activity in the gardens. Each youth was allotted their own personal garden and shared in planting experimental, science-based gardens, herb/pizza gardens, sunflower houses and grow-a-row gardens, with produce harvested going to local food banks. By the end of harvest, youth and volunteers picked a total of 5609 pounds of produce that went home to their families, as well as to feed hungry families via our food bank network. This year, we have expanded the program and renamed it, “The 24 Carrot Gardens Education Program”. This program focuses on the following three good food objectives:
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. This year we are orchestrating a network of twenty-eight gardens in the Salem-Keizer area, as well as ten gardens throughout Marion and Polk counties. 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 deep through Health, Education and the ARTS. As a community food project, we envision folks 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.
Directly below are questions based on three important criteria that we strive to meet in our decision making every day, with the ultimate goal of sustainably growing the gardens program into the future.
Passing the Test:
Mission:
How are we addressing the hunger that is prevalent in our communities today, and how are we focused on feeding the future? This is the question that gets us to the heart of the issue, and it is from this place that we act intentionally to address the caloric and nutritional needs of our community through gardening while learning how to recreate a strong garden ethic throughout the region. Is the program cultivating this effectively, and how might we improve?
Stability:
Are the goals of the program being reached in an innovative, systematic and sustainable way? From a certain perspective, we are on our way, and the steps that we are taking are promising. You as a community member play a big role as we together take on hunger. The important thing is that we value what is viable and co-intelligent as we work to preserve the Food Share’s integrity as an example of what is right and needed. Is it with gardens that we lead community to the promise land?
Culture:
Do we as people move away from a process of self-reliance, empowerment and community, and is this is what leads us on a downward spiral? If so, then why don’t we move back to this place by getting on a scrumptiously cooperative food track that moves everyone toward an artful, equitable and prosperous future where good food is at everyone’s fingertips?