Because of you, more children will start the school day ready to learn, without the pang of hunger as a distraction. Our Back-to-School campaign reminds us that along with pencils and paper, children need a daily supply of food to take on new concepts, run on playgrounds, and socialize more successfully.
Our Community Health and Agriculture Education teams have collaborated to develop the new Food Shuttle Academy, an online learning platform with free, self-paced lessons on health, nutrition, agriculture, and more!
Our Spring Match challenge, made possible by generous funders, including SOLV Energy and the Mead Family Foundation, exceeded the $105,000 goal, raising an additional $70,000 to erase hunger!
Love, Tito’s has a heart for community gardens and increasing access to fresh, healthy foods. Their philanthropic Love, Tito’s Block to Block program, reconnects neighborhoods and creates community gardens and farms throughout the United States. Our hearts are in full bloom knowing that our Camden Street Garden will be the next beneficiary of Block to Block, allowing neighbors with mobility challenges to access our many activities more easily.
How does a collection of temporary residents in a transitional housing project become a community of neighbors? For the Hotel to Home bridge housing program of Reinvestment Partners, the effort to do so centers on a garden—or more specifically, two garden beds. The garden beds were built a year ago by staff and volunteers of Inter-Faith Food Shuttle’s Gardens For Everyone project at the Carolina Duke Inn in Durham.
Many hands make light work in the garden at Brown’s Early Learning School. And though a good number of those hands are small, the harvest the garden brings forth is rich and bountiful and filled with good things that big and little people like to eat. The Durham preschool is home to ten garden beds provided by Inter-Faith Food Shuttle’s Gardens For Everyone program.
Fabette Smith was convinced that her community needed to have an available source with which to grow their own food. She turned to an organization long known for their gardening expertise, and for working with neighbors to create sustainable food sources—Inter-Faith Food Shuttle—and together, they’re growing a new community garden in southeast Raleigh.
Citizens were encouraged to plant Victory Gardens to provide their own fruits and vegetables. The Durham Bulls are carrying on the tradition today in partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina and Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, by growing fresh local food for our community at the Victory Garden at Durham Bulls Athletic Park.
As the Gardens For Everyone program continues to bloom in Wake and Durham Counties, sprouting new garden bed boxes each week for new gardeners in the community, the need for gardening knowledge and hands-on familiarity with the soil has grown along with it. Enter the Gardens For Everyone Mentorship Program—an opportunity for seasoned gardeners to pass along their gardening wisdom and experience with newcomers to the joys of growing food in the earth.
The idea of gardening had occupied a tiny corner of my mind for quite some time, but the idea of growing my own “clean” organic vegetables did not come full circle until late fall and early winter of 2016. I was confronted with what could have become a serious physical challenge that turned my attention to eating organically.
In the interest of helping to care for our resident bees at the Food Shuttle’s Urban Learning Gardens, this past winter I and fellow Food Shuttle garden coordinator, Fern Hickey, took part in a beekeeping class with the Durham County Beekeeper’s Association.
