Enivornment Community Opportunity Charter School

The Environment Community Opportunity (ECO) Charter School seeks to empower students to become adept learners, community leaders and environmental stewards. We seek support to further develop our school garden in an effort to fulfill our mission. When we envisioned a garden, we wanted to create an outdoor sanctuary where students would feel safe and become inspired by planting, growing and maintaining a variety of fruits, vegetables and flowers. We imagined students identifying plants by learning characteristics, visualized students learning to care for plants and connecting experiences to other areas in their lives and foresaw opportunities for students to savor fruits and vegetables while developing interests related to the natural world. We sought to make the cultivation and consumption of fresh produce a lifelong habit. If awarded funding, we would sponsor a food composting program where the students would save fruit and vegetable scraps to be decomposed into rich compost used to amend our soil. Also, we would add a permanent fruit area, incorporating blueberries, raspberries and strawberries.