EAE: Edible Schoolyard Project

Our Edible Schoolyard: Cultivating, Collaborating, Captivating & Sustaining the Community

Our mission at Eastlawn is to cultivate a community garden and eventually an Edible Schoolyard; inspiring growth in collaboration, engagement, experiential learning, empowerment, and sustainable life skills for our students, staff, and families. This space will serve as an outdoor classroom across grade levels and subject areas, from a space for students to learn about nutrient cycling to a place where art projects can take on a new life.  We want to use this space to give students the opportunity to grow and taste nutrient rich food from seed to table, helping them to build both a sense of personal capacity and the connection to where the food in the supermarket comes from.  In providing a space for students to play and get their hands dirty, while learning about horticulture, botany, ecology and sustainability we want to captivate and inspire students to believe in a new future to which they can contribute.The potentiality spurred by the idea of a community garden already has students in the entrepreneur group talking about starting a farm stand to sell produce to neighbors and family members.  Fourth graders recognizing and planning to address a need facing their community.  This level of ownership, ingenuity and dreaming is what we are hoping to support and help students actualize with this project, knowing it will spread into the community.  We are working with the North Park Farmers Market to see this first initiative through.This garden will also serve to supplement our Backpack Program, providing opportunities for students and their families to participate in the production of the food being sent home with students each week.  This program currently offers processed foods and canned goods to 100 families; a statistic we are proud of, a statistic that helps to keep hundreds of students fed.  However, with the plethora of research regarding the relationship between nutrition, learning and mental health, we believe it is paramount to transition to offering organically grown, whole foods through the program.  The Eastlawn community garden will be the first step towards this and continuing to connect to local community gardens and farms will help make it a reality.Furthermore, many of our staff members have expressed a need for a mechanism that can help our students learn social skills and manage their “big emotions” such as anger, frustration, disappointment and embarrassment.  Our belief is that a community garden can be an advantageous structure for building social skills. This type of structure can prepare students for life beyond the walls of school and give them the tools necessary for success and longevity; this shared endeavor can lead to the disruption of cyclical poverty that has plagued many of our families for years.Through this project we hope to emphasize that a community garden can be so much more than just a source of locally grown produce for a community.  A community garden prompts student and parent involvement in an action-oriented and pertinent endeavor that can positively impact their lives now and in the future.  It develops a habit of civic engagement that ripples out into the community at large. James Beard said “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” Food can unite us, teach us, sustain us, and give food security to our hardworking and economically disadvantaged families. In order to make this dream a reality we recognize there will be a great deal of learning and preparation to be done and reaching out to members of the community who share this vision and have the technical skills to support it will be crucial.   We are excited to be collaborating with community partners such as Healthy Alamance and members of the Alamance Food Collaborative as well as allocating grant monies to be used in a training process for our teacher leaders.  We want to have the opportunity to learn more information about the edible schoolyard and then train our staff who will be able to begin implementing this knowledge in their own classrooms and grade levels.