The Problem
We are a district 75 school in Brooklyn, NY, located in the Ingersoll Projects. Our students have autism spectrum disorder, emotional disabilities, intellectual disabilities, speech delays, and fetal alcohol syndrome. We want our students to feel like they are part of and contribute to a community. Although our students do not have much, they are very giving and care about others, especially those children in Haiti and Syria. We wish to start a community garden, where we would sell vegetables to the local community for very low prices, provide free produce to the homeless shelter next door and harvest seeds to send to countries affected by devastation and hunger. We hope that the profits could benefit our classroom to expand our garden, help other classrooms get involved in the garden and help us unite with the other schools in the building. This garden is currently shared among 3 schools- a community school, our district 75 school and a charter school. This space allows all three schools to work collaboratively. We hope that this community garden can continue to bring unity to our school community. We recently lost our grant, which funded a community garden leader to take charge of the garden and provide free lunch garden programs. We are hoping to restore this program and hopefully generate our school's green market. The students in each of the three schools come from highest poverty need areas in Brooklyn and are Title I.
