The Vegetable Project, which leads hundreds upon hundreds of Albany students in getting their hands dirty each year, invites its friends to show their support for the organization’s research-based efforts by sponsoring a garden bed for the 2024 growing season. With gardens at Albany High School and Stephen and Harriet Myers Middle School and a partnership with the Friendship Garden of the Delaware Community, we will mount a handsome sign, 4 inches by 12 inches, on the side of a raised garden bed at one garden in exchange for a contribution of $150 and will maintain the installation until March 1, 2025. Or please consider sponsoring beds at two gardens for $275 or at all three for $375.
Please check out the kind and generous garden bed sponsors from previous years.
Funding supports creating hands-on learning opportunities for Albany kids, and especially kids with great needs, by building gardens, growing plants and harnessing the power of exposure to nature. It strengthens our work during the school day and after the last bell rings. It makes possible paid employment for high school students and helps us offer workplace preparation in partnership with Albany’s summer youth employment program. And still more importantly, it moves forward development of an outdoor classroom at Myers Middle School and builds sustainability of our work.
Together, these initiatives build equity, thus supporting one of the Albany school district’s most compelling goals, by boosting student contact with greenery, real breezes and soil. Indeed, extensive research links wellbeing, and academic achievement that depends on such wellbeing, to time in and around nature. And from backyards to summer camps to family road trips to beaches and mountains, time in and around nature surely is not distributed especially equitably.
We would be so grateful to shout out names of individuals, families, businesses and other organizations as garden bed sponsors. And we would be even more pleased if our friends shared a flier about this opportunity with their friends.
Please reach out at [email protected] with questions or to make arrangements. And many thanks for helping us through our first 14 years.
The Vegetable Project, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, was created by and continues to be led by parents of Albany students.
–Bill Stoneman
