Our goals by undertaking this initiative is to:
- Employ and empower nine young, budding minds towards communal and self-sustaining actions. The nine youth hired would be responsible for animating and leading three vegetable and several native plant gardens, coordinating volunteers, and other community services. By doing so, we hope to inspire city youth into becoming more ecologically astute members of the community and taking positive leadership roles.
- Create a new community food garden in Masaryk Park next to the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre. Check our HOPE (Healthy Organic Parkdale Edibles) Community Garden section for more information.
- Engage volunteers from the broader Parkdale community into our HOPE Garden by way of youth-organized work-bees, free capacity-building workshops, volunteer gardening, and various special events.
- Work with Sketch to engage street-involved youth as volunteers in the garden where they will be encouraged to bring art to the gardens, gain ecological knowledge, cultivate and enjoy healthy food to take back to Sketch. (Sketch is an art studio and drop-in program for street-involved youth.)
- Partner with Ecuhome to support their residents in starting gardens at their buildings (Ecuhome is a local supportive housing provider for the homeless and “hard to house”. Many of their residents struggle with mental health issues, addictions, and poverty.)
- Building community capacity by offering public workshops on various aspects of organic gardening, environmental stewardship and healthy living; including the harvesting and cooking of fresh, healthy vegetables (with support from Evergreen, an environmental organization that specializes in renaturalization and ecological gardening projects.)
- Greening and beautifying Parkdale with enhancements to a native plant garden in the nearby Beaty Boulevard Parkette (with support from Wal-Mart-Evergreen Green Grants program).
- Providing community service by delivering freshly harvested produce to community kitchens at the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre and Sketch, and helping prepare food there for community members in need.
- Promoting and using sustainable transportation such as bicycles and cargo trailers for the transportation of garden supplies and produce, and also for personal transportation.