2nd Annual Brooklyn School Gardens Crawl!

Garden Train's mission is to grow community by connecting our public school gardens with the larger community. New York City's school gardens are often on the perimeter of a schoolyard, serving as a living link between schools and community. When this link is strengthened, both schools and community benefit.

Garden Train, New York City's first and only districtwide school gardens consortium, hosted Brooklyn's first School Gardens Crawl in 2018, giving the opportunity for neighbors to learn about our school gardens,which are open to the public on the day of the Crawl. The public is invited to visit, or "crawl to" one or all of the participating school gardens at their leisure. The success of the first Crawl, based on widespread media coverage and community participation, showed that neighbors, garden lovers and families, are eager to learn about and engage with our school gardens. Community organizations and businesses are eager to support the event which brings neighbors together in a place that represents nature, our children, education and the common good. The open garden day, which takes place each September reminds people how wonderful our public schools are, but we can't host this event without support.

School gardens are led by school staff as well as families who volunteer their time year-round, even when school is closed.  In order to make the Crawl a robust event that engages the community, resources are needed to support tours, workshops and family activities in the garden.

The funding we receive will be the engine that makes the 2nd Annual Brooklyn School Gardens Crawl a success!  As soon as we meet our goal, we can print nice flyers to post all over the school district, provide each school with money to help them flesh out an exciting program for the Crawl and place our first order for t-shirts ever. 

School gardens represent so many important ideas we need to see more of in society today and want to cultivate in our students: respect for nature and the environment, respect for process and a journey, spending time where hands are off digital screens and in healthy soil, working together with others in real life towards tangible goals, and working with challenges that are often out of one's control, such as weather.  Also, school gardens grow community!  Not only within a school, but between a school and its neighbors.  The idea of opening up a school garden's gates for our annual Crawl is about building bridges and connections.