Greenville Community Gardens

Our Mission

Greenville Gardens’ core mission is to empower residents to be advocates for sustainable communities, allowing our members to transform Greenville into an environmentally friendly green space and sustainable community through their personal participation and leadership.
 

Everyone deserves the right to good food. Better. Fresher. Cheaper. Early in 2011, the seed for the Greenville Community Gardens project was envisioned and began to take root in the mind of its creator, Jeffrey B. Besecker.

A local chef of sorts and a devotee of the local foods movement, Besecker began to see a growing gap between the availability of  fresh, wholesome food-stuffs and their easy availability to the citizens of his birth place of Greenville, Ohio. Although situated in the heart of prime Ohio farmland, the town seemed to be, in a looser sense of the word – a food dessert.

Acres, upon acres of corn, soy beans and wheat dot the fields surrounding this community of roughly 13,000, yet little was being done to provide freshly grown, locally supplied vegetables at an economical price. Inspired by the efforts of the town’s local Main Street Greenville association to establish a viable farmers market, the dream of creating a community garden system available to the greater portion of the area population bloomed.

Teamed with the shared passion of Diana Unger, a local fitness instructor and Megan Liette, a new mother, the trio set out to formulate a plan to bring community gardening into reality in the area. An established goal has been set to break ground and take advantage of the 2012 growing season with the first of 5 possible community green spaces.

At Greenville Community Gardens we are taking a town that’s already Green and making it Greener.