Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation

Oklahoma City Beautiful operates programming within 24 local schools, keeping teachers, parents and community members engaged with the school gardens. With a growing interest from students and teachers to use the garden more frequently, funding from the Sprouts Healthy Communities Grant will allow Garden Educators from Oklahoma City Beautiful to work directly with the schools, delivering structured science lessons, hosting hands-on gardening and composting sessions, and facilitating regular harvesting and tasting experiences.

Living Classrooms works with kids and teens in Baltimore, Md. providing resources to help them reach their full potential. Among their many enduring programs is Baltimore Urban Gardening with Students (BUGS), which serves second through fifth graders with interactive lessons through its greenhouse, cooking lab, vegetable gardens and onsite wetlands, teaching them the entire farm-to-table lifecycle. Each spring, the students host their own farmers’ market where they sell produce grown in the garden and gain real-world experience using their math and entrepreneurial skills. Funding from the Sprouts Healthy Communities Grant will allow BUGS to expand, making it possible for nearly twice as many kids to participate. On days when the students are leading the cooking lessons, parents will also be invited to attend and learn about the importance of eating and preparing a healthy meal, from their kids.

Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful encourages environmental stewardship throughout their community through numerous cleanup and tree-planting projects and the Florida Learning Garden, where students participate in hands-on greenhouse, composting, gardening and upcycling activities. With the Healthy Communities Grant, Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful will work in collaboration with Farm to School Tampa to teach kids garden education lessons through in-school and after-school programming. Kids will also participate in cooking demonstrations and taste tests with produce harvested locally from the garden.

Garden School Foundation (GSF) provides in-depth garden-based education to youth at Title I schools in Los Angeles, strengthening connections between food justice, environmental awareness, and community health. Their Seed to Table program of hands-on gardening and nutritional cooking classes teach over 3,000 children a year how to collaboratively grow, harvest, and prepare their own healthy foods. In the spring of 2018, GSF launched the Cafeteria to Compost program at their flagship garden at 24th St. Elementary in Historic West Adams, diverting over 2,000 lbs. of food waste a month straight from the lunch tables to the garden’s compost piles. Students, parents, and school staff are collaboratively learning the importance of food waste reduction and the science of soil building. As a Healthy Communities Grant recipient, GSF aims to increase their monthly diversion of food waste to 4,000 lbs./month, launch a related whole foods recovery and redistribution effort, and explore expanding the Cafeteria to Compost program to its six other school sites and beyond!