A grant awarded to a Springfield, Missouri nonprofit is being used to teach young people about agriculture. And, recently, the grant recipient, Springfield Community Gardens, held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the People’s Garden grant from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Partners in the education effort — the American Indian Center of Springfield, Springfield Public Schools, Ozark Mountain Permaculture, the Springfield-Greene County Library District, the Watershed Center and MU Extension — gathered at the SCG Midtown Community Garden to celebrate.
Anna Withers, farmer and resource development manager with SCG, said the grant is $50,000 over three years. The money will be used to prepare the nonprofit’s sites to be educational spaces "so that we can increase outreach and education, especially amongst youth in Springfield," she said, "so that people know more about urban gardening and health and nutrition and how to actually use what they're growing in the gardens at home."
Those educational spaces are new People’s Gardens sites at Reed Academy, the Midtown Community Garden and the garden at the American Indian Center.
Besides enhancing garden infrastructure and supplies at those sites, the grant will provide regenerative agriculture youth education. And Gina Marie Walden, circulation manager for the Midtown Carnegie Branch Library, said the money will allow the district to provide after school youth cooking literacy classes with produce provided by SCG. She said it’s all about collaboration.
"What's great about this program with Springfield Community Gardens is that all of us have connected," she said. "You have Springfield Community Gardens, you have the American Indian Center of Springfield, you have the Extension office, and so, by making those connections , we're able to make our community stronger, and that's part of, like, the public library's mission."
The library district has an heirloom seed garden at the Midtown garden where seeds are collected for the Heirloom Seed Library.
Justine Lines was at the ribbon cutting ceremony. She’s a retired SPS biology teacher and current GLADE coordinator, helped start the Midtown Community Garden 15 years ago. She says gardening is a great way to connect kids to nature and to help them understand how things fit together.
"All of the connections, so from, you know, looking at compost and understanding how that works, to, like, looking at the pollinators," she said.
SCG already reaches youth through its 4-H Club, which has a garden at the Midtown site.
