$300,000 for Community Food Project

How do we make ourselves obsolete? That is the baseline question at The Gardens Project for building a sustainable food movement. Our answer: training community and school gardens to do our job!

This Winter, we are implementing a 3 year intensive garden leadership training program. In the first year, we are recruiting and training 20 gardeners from 10 different gardens. We received a three year Community Food Project grant of $300,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture. This grant will allow us to support family and community food security by building leadership skills and new community gardens and increasing food production and marketing capacity.

In January, we will be initiating a Community and School Garden Coordinator Training which will develop leadership, advocacy, community organizing, and food production and marketing skills to 20-30 gardeners in the Ukiah Area. This training will be expanded to the rest of the county, including Willits and the coast over the second and third years of the grant.

Additionally, we will be hosting food production classes this spring and summer which will be open to the public.

Another important part of the grant will be engaging Head Start families in their new gardens by providing farmers market vouchers to those families who volunteer in their child's school garden – thus helping bring new customers and dollars to our local farmers while increasing access to local, healthy produce!