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Our mission with the Schoolyard Nature
Network is to establish a foundation of financial, in-kind and training
resources to sustain school garden programs.
The school garden
movement is taking off across the country
and around
the world with school gardens
popping
up at educational institutions of every size and type
around the globe. Creating a school garden is the easy part. The challenge is to launch a school garden
program that will survive past the first or second
year. The bigger challenge is to establish a program that will
survive after the founder(s) move on. (Most school garden
programs fail when the person with the passion is no longer involved.)
The immediate goal of the Schoolyard Nature
Network is
to strengthen the school garden
movement, not by duplicating Granny's Garden
School, but by serving as a guide for others
to learn from our experience.
We
focus on the fundamentals of
creating and maintaining the physical site, integrating educational
standards, and securing funding and supplies. Our more important
long-term goal is to work with the "Garden Industry" and others to
develop a funding stream to provide funding for class garden
coordinators - as that is the key to sustaining a garden program.
The
Schoolyard Nature Network is the natural
outgrowth of
the requests for information and training
from nearly
100 institutions
coming to tour and observe our methods.
Granny's Garden School's staff and
volunteers have a unique knowledge base
acquired during nearly ten years of working
with 1,700 students each week in a public school environment. Our
standards based
lesson guides and garden/classroom schedule delivered by our
staff of class garden coordinators allows the
program to be
incorporated into the school day.
On 1/13/2011, Molly Van Hart wrote:
"Hi
Granny,
I just wanted to give you a little update! Last
night myself and few of our 6th grade students presented to
the school board our ideas for starting a garden and our plan of action
we would like to take. I told them about meeting you and your great
program and even the subject of paid staff came up and I shared your
wisdom about paying for staff not stuff. So thank you very much for the
knowledge! We didn’t request any money from the board, just the okay to
go ahead with our plan and they said yes!
So next week during health we’ll have some of
our students go out and measure off our area and start measuring for
beds and start bringing in what we can to start some good soil going. So
that’s where we are now! I know I’ll be contacting you in the future
with questions and updates but here’s the first!
Thank you again for paving the way with your
program and sharing it!
Your garden ally,
Molly
Molly Van Hart, Wellness
Coordinator, Lincoln Middle School,
931 Old Town Loop Rd., Oakland, OR
97462 |
