raised for Miami-Dade County public schools
Printer Friendly VersionPlant A Thousand Gardens Collaborative Nutrition Initiative
PLANTING THE SEEDS FOR A LIFETIME OF HEALTHY EATING
Simply put, the urgency to educate children on their bodies has become as critical as improving their minds.
The Plant A Thousand Gardens Collaborative Nutrition Initiative (CNI) took root in five M-DCPS elementary schools in 2007 to address academic achievement while confronting the obesity epidemic that afflicts one of three American children. The program uses edible gardens as outdoor learning laboratories to instill in children the desire to eat vegetables, the knowledge to reduce intake of unhealthy foods and the love of learning in all subjects. Based around the hands-on planting and harvesting of edible vegetable and herb gardens, students become enthusiastic participants in an interdisciplinary experience that combines the teaching of nutrition with learning in science, math, art, reading and writing. Meanwhile, parents work in the gardens, contribute recipes and attend workshops, where they learn ways to cook healthy.
The initiative engages students, over the course of the school year, to plant and maintain vegetable and herb gardens on school grounds while using those gardens to educate about healthy eating and nutrition. Organizers hope the two-year study will nurture more than tomatoes and carrots, as parents will be engaged throughout the entire process, community gardeners and health advocates will be invited to participate, and school leaders will share their results as a blueprint for future nutritional literacy.
From a pilot in five schools, the Plant A Thousand Gardens program has grown to now involve more than 3,000 students from 25 Miami-Dade County Public Schools, with a high concentrations of ethnically diverse populations from lower-income families. Thus, in four years, the program has expanded to serve almost 10% of all elementary schools in the district. Parents and families attend evening and weekend workshops, discussing many of the same topics and sharing family recipes and eating traditions.
The foundation of the edible gardens program is teacher training. In 2010-11, we expanded within schools, with more than 100 teachers attending after-school and Saturday training sessions to both learn and share how to plant and maintain edible gardens, integrate them into the curriculum, reach out to the community, collect data to evaluate the program and advocate for nutrition literacy and healthy eating. The success of our 25 current schools, where teachers have now assumed ownership of the garden programs and initiated training of new teachers, has inspired us to make this “teacher-to-teacher" training the catalyst for future expansion.
The program is directed at elementary-school students because dietary preferences and eating patterns form early in life and set the stage for long-term health prospects. The ultimate objective of the Plant A Thousand Gardens Collaborative Nutrition Initiative is to significantly change eating patterns in children and their families in ways that will last a lifetime.
CNI receives signature sponsorship from Wachovia, a Wells Fargo Company. Additional support for CNI is provided by the Allegany Franciscan Ministries, Assurant, and the Peacock Foundation, Inc.
For more information, please contact Juli Zeno at 305-892-5099 ext. 12 or e-mail jzeno@educationfund.org.
Photos by Peter Uttal & Jeannie Necessary
Signature sponsorship by
