Inter-Faith Food Shuttle's Camden Street Learning Garden

The Inter-Faith Food Shuttle is a hunger-relief organization serving seven counties in and around the Triangle area of North Carolina.  Our state has one the highest percentages in the United States of children under 18 years of age who are food insecure on a regular basis -  1 in 4.  In our seven counties alone, over 275,000 people are food insecure.  Our mission is to pioneer innovative, transformative solutions designed to end hunger in our community.  We believe hunger is fixable if the community works together to do two things: create sources of healthy food in every low-income neighborhood and grow opportunities for people to provide for themselves by learning job skills or growing their own food.  From BackPack Buddies to nutrition education, mobile markets to community and school learning gardens, culinary job training to agriculture training, we go directly to people in need and create what works to empower them.  We feed. We teach. We grow…to create a hunger-free and healthy community.

The Food Shuttle provides emergency food assistance while also going a step further to create sustainable and local solutions to food hardship.  This is best demonstrated by our Urban Agriculture Program which focuses on addressing urban food insecurity by teaching community members how to be more self-reliant as they learn how to grow and cook their own healthy produce. Our learning garden sites in both Raleigh (the Camden Street Learning Garden) and Durham (the Geer Street Learning Garden) North Carolina, provides community members with opportunities to learn these self-sufficiency skills through a variety of all ages programming.  These programs not only enable families to grow a portion of their own food at home but they also lead to reduced grocery bills and healthier lifestyles.  

Our programs work together to provide experiential learning opportunities for entire families.  While parents are learning how to garden with us at the end of their work day, their children are learning how to garden and prepare healthy meals with us during the school day.  Adults and teens can take advantage of Seed to Supper, a free five week beginner’s gardening class that teaches low income participants the basics of growing fresh produce and provides them with all the supplies they need to start their own backyard garden.  Similarly, our Growing Community program provides low income residents of Raleigh with the training, tools and space they need to grow their own food at one of thirty-two community garden beds at our Camden Street Learning Garden.  Throughout the year we provide participants and the community at large with access to a variety of gardening and cooking workshops to build upon their new skill set.

Collectively, our Urban Agriculture Program serves over 2,500 people in both Wake and Durham Counties each year.  Of those 2,500 participants, 1,500 are children who participate in our Growing School Gardens program.  We work very closely with our school partners to offer regular gardening and cooking electives, IFFS led cafeteria taste tests, school field trips to our learning garden sites which provide evidence based gardening and cooking experiences, after school gardening and cooking clubs and service learning partnerships with other schools the area. We have developed dedicated partnerships with two schools in particular:  Hunter Elementary, which is located in Raleigh next to the Camden Street Learning Garden and Eastway Elementary which is located in Durham near the Geer Street Learning Garden.  These two schools are just as committed as we are to providing students with experiential edible education throughout the school day as well as after school.  We work with our partners to uphold the values of healthy living, self sufficiency, community and environmental stewardship in everything we do.