St. Aloysius School

In 2009, the students, families and community of St. Aloysius School came together to build our school garden. We use the space as an outdoor classroom to enliven our lessons in science, writing, art, math and history.

The flagship program that we developed from the bounty of our garden is our donation-based Farmers Market, which students and teachers co-operate on campus as often as the yield from the garden allows. Given a big empty bag, community members come to our market stall and fill up on fresh fruit and vegetables (often with recipe cards attached) and put whatever they are able into our donation tin. We then donate all of the proceeds to local, national and international charities. Since its inception in 2009, we have donated just over $6,000 to charities from the fruits and labor of the market.