The Office of Innovation and Development has been working to help Graham Elementary School with expanding their school garden - and it's growing! The local company, Whole Foods, have pitched in to help as well !
The following post is a re-post written originally by Nona Evans that can be found at http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2011/11/leaders-get-their-garden-on/
One
of the most wonderful traditions within Whole Foods Market is that each
of our teams are encouraged by our leaders to hold an annual team
building event. More often than not, teams choose to include a community
service component. Our company leaders are no exception; they truly
practice what they preach!
Just last month the Global Vice Presidents from each department at
our corporate office gathered for their own team build and they got
their hands dirty. Literally. They spent their morning helping Austin’s
Graham Elementary School turn their one-year-old set of eight raised
garden beds into the school’s vision of a living classroom.
The
work included assembling picnic tables, digging, installing drip
irrigation in existing beds, weeding, creating two new limestone raised
beds, digging, mulching walkways and digging. Lots of digging!
Graham Elementary is pretty special. A few years ago the school was
rated “acceptable” by state standards. But with the creativity and
passion of the school’s faculty, lead by principal Blaine Helwig, the
school has celebrated an “exemplary” rating for the last three years!
They intend to continue this progress by implementing experiential
learning — like that of the living classroom.
What
makes Graham’s garden tick is the fact that the entire community is a
part of the effort. For example, a couple of years ago two local
non-profits, the Sustainable Food Center and Marathon Kids, partnered
with the school to create a wellness team made up of parents, teachers
and community members. And all of these groups showed up to help out as
this first stage of garden transformation took place.
According to master gardener Margaret Earnest, who insists she’s
“just a volunteer,” the kids are learning all sorts of things in the
garden including science and botany. “We just don’t tell them that,” she
says. Margaret also leads the school’s 4
th and 5
th
grade weekly after-school garden club which has a membership of over 50
kids this year! The day our group was there the club was releasing
worms into the compost pile.
The
garden at Graham is just one component of an even broader health effort
at the school, which also features participation in Sustainable Food
Center’s Sprouting Healthy Kids farm to school program and their Happy
Kitchen cooking classes for parents. As well as Marathon Kids physical
activity program – all led by members of the Graham school-community.
The formula for success developed at Graham can work for just about any school:
- find a couple of people who have deep passion and expertise
- find even more people who are willing to learn and support
- create a vision, a plan and implement it in phases
- believe in the genius of our children
- unleash their spirit
Our hats off to Graham and their supporters for their commitment to
their kids, to our Whole Foods Market leaders who (literally) dug in to
this worthy cause in their community and to all the communities
everywhere where school gardens are teaching life lessons. See how you
can help school gardens grow by
visiting the Whole Kids Foundation website.
