May 07, 2011

Community Gardening

I'm slowly but surely working on adding items to all of the tabs on the site.  In the meantime I wanted to mention a cool project I found out about that is going on in Atlantic County on Saturday, May 14th:

Atlantic County Community Garden Project

Each person who wants to participate has his/her own plot for which they are responsible, as well as a sponsor to help guide them through the process.  They even have volunteers and a help line people can call if they have questions.  The whole project has been funded through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NJ Partnership for Healthy Kids. 

Could you imagine if every low-income working family living in an urban area had access to their own plot of land to grow a bit of their own food, as well as a sponsor to teach and guide them? 

On a somewhat related note, I wanted to share about a woman I heard speak at a recent Fortune Conference.  She is an economic consultant who runs her own organization- Majora Carter Group. One of the main focuses of her business is how to involve low-income people and families (usually in urban areas) in the "green living" movement.  You know, the people who don't have yards to grow vegetables or cars to drive to Trader Joe's.  The people who work three jobs and send their children to a low-income daycare that-- gasp!-- doesn't have a tolerance for cloth-diapered children.  The people who don't have cloth diapers to begin with because they have to take public transportation just to get to a laundromat.  The people who don't own spice racks or kitchen islands or immersion blenders... who travel each day along a bus route that passes four McDonald's and zero Whole Foods. 

That's a lot of people, and one mission of Ms. Carter is to make environmentally-friendly life options affordable and accessible to them. 

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