Grow to Give

I just returned from a Grow to Give meeting, which is a subcommittee of the Staten Island Hunger Task   Force, a group committed to seeing to it that food pantries are well stocked and policies are in place that ensure hungry people have enough food to eat. Grow to Give focuses specifically on creating community gardens whose yield can be used to help feed the hungry. Originally, the plan was to have a conference on February 2nd to share with as many interested people as possible how far the community garden movement has progressed on Staten Island. It was decided, however, that this is not a good time for such a meeting and that the three segments of Grow to Give: Food pantries, Gardeners, and Volunteers should identify some goals and priorities for the coming months.

It seems to me that members of the Wagner community potentially represent both the gardeners and the volunteers of Grow to Give. A while back, there had been talk of creating a community garden at a charter school that would be supervised, in part, by Wagner. Although this garden has been slow to get off the ground, I think we have a new motivation to get it going. The motivation is dealing with hunger. Initially, the charter school garden was being planned to support educational efforts and to bring the members of one local neighborhood together around a worthwhile project, while also producing healthy food. Now, with Grow to Give, we have the added incentive of growing food to address the needs of hungry people. Incredibly, about 1 in 4 children in New York City go to bed hungry every night. In this one section of Staten Island, the hunger rate among children may even be higher. A community garden is a small but very productive way to begin to deal with this problem. If this community garden can get up and running and lead to other such gardens, the impact could be significant. Furthermore, when Wagner students learn about the garden and its goals, I think we will have a lot of volunteers and a lot learners who want to gain a deeper understanding of the systemic causes of hunger and poverty. How far we can get on this is hard to say. But Grow to Give seems like a wonderful place to start.