From The Ground Up Farms has established a series of community gardens in unused empty lots, residential treatment facilities, homeless shelters and even low income daycare's, beginning in our poorest neighborhoods. These immersive projects involve residents of all ethnicities and backgrounds in working with experienced farmers and educators to learn how to grow food, cook it and improve their physical/emotional/financial health through a variety of other life skills classes. We feel that if we provide access to healthy food and education in nutrition and life skills, we can improve the lives in our community. By offering these programs our community will improve their nutrition and their health by reducing illness, reducing stress and improving financial and food security. As a by-product, these community gardens will bring neighborhoods together by building bridges between cultures as they work hand in hand to feed their families.
We are impacting hundreds of households and children by offering free healthy food, nutrition and life skills education. We are supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to after school and summer lunch programs, as well as, teaching nutrition at Chico schools. We're also impacting homeless individuals by offering "work for food" programs and other opportunities.
We would like to start a produce stand at each garden and those funds raised by each garden would be used to help to offset the maintenance and material costs, as well as, throw an end of season party for the neighborhood who helped to support the gardens.
Our goal is to teach our community a better path to food security and independence from the overwhelming prices of "nutritional" food at the grocery stores. We don't believe that healthy organically grown food should be a luxury only the wealthy can afford. Our hope is that everyone plants their own garden in their own back yard and pays it forward. Please pass on the lessons and the extra food. Let's change the world!
The following goals will guide our efforts:
- To bring our community members together so that they can learn about nutrition through gardening and life skill workshops, all for free. We offer guidance and some basic assistance and tools to help install new gardens. Then we will teach your group how to maintain, harvest and cook from their new garden. Landowners of the empty, unused lots can even enjoy tax benefits that come by donating the use of lots and water on seasonal agreements.
- To provide quality workshops that will teach gardening, harvesting, cooking, preserving, nutrition, physical activity, anxiety control through breathing and even marketing their own healthy organic food, all for free. We have a wide range of professionals donating their time and experience to teach these "Life Skills" workshops, as well as, a certified kitchen to cook in.
- To help fill the gap for programs that feed our young and old alike, for example, daycare's, after school programs, summer lunch programs, nursing homes, residential rehabilitation programs and food pantries. These all struggle to obtain anything fresh and we would provide it all for free.
- Our large homeless population could learn so much from "working for food" initially at a community garden. They could learn responsibility, self reliance, improved nutrition which will reduce illness, how to grow and have fresh food (even while living homeless) by preserving and even learning marketing and social interaction from a farmers market type program.Those who earn it could work into possible paid part time positions in the future.