Empowering Forgotten Neighborhoods
Working with locals of low-income neighborhoods to foster community gardens promoting healthy living, self-reliance and delivering established social services directly to vulnerable families within their own community.
Leader
Turnaround Community Garden Alliance .
Location
South 58th Street Philadelphia, PA 19139
About the project
Thank you to everyone who supported this fundraiser! Please click here for updates about this project!
Help us fund our very first Community Garden project in West Philadelphia!
We recently founded Turnaround Community Garden Alliance (TCGA) to help empower the lives of vulnerable families in low-income neighborhoods. We need your help to make this happen! Our program’s focus is reclaiming existing vacant lots in underserved neighborhoods, turning them into community gardens, working hand in hand with the local community to promote healthy eating, healing, community engagement, and neighborhood pride.
Our Turnaround Community Gardens will offer Five Primary Pillars as the foundation for a self-sufficient, successful future. Working with our established social services partners, we will orchestrate direct, on-going access to:
1) Healthy food options and hunger relief
2) New job skills and employment
3) Healthcare possibilities with one-on-one guidance
4) Childhood and adult literacy resources
5) Art and Music Programs
Your donation enables us to launch our very first Turnaround Community Garden located in West Philadelphia, covering the costs of our project manager/team leader, lumber, mulch, proper soil, liability insurance, transportation of New York City volunteers to the Philadelphia site and treats for the on-site volunteers working in the cold winter months.
Our vacant lot “Transformation Team” will bring folks in the neighborhood together with justice-involved youth who will work alongside the locals. These young boys and girls will learn job skills and team work from our leadership team and the locals themselves, as well as the value of being part of a larger family community, all working together to create a better, more secure life.
The Steps
- November 10: Site final review and walkthrough with project manager and on site team
- December 26-30: Clean out entire lot: Demolition/Hazard Waste Removal /Soil Testing
- January 3 - 5: Create new lot foundation to support/cultivate the garden
- January 6 -10: Build raised garden boxes, tool shed and compost bin
- January 13 - 16: Prepare soil, protect garden beds for Winter in anticipation of Spring planting
Why we‘re doing it
We are grassroots volunteers who, over many election-cycles, canvassed marginalized neighborhoods in Philadelphia and New York seeking support for our candidates and causes. We grew increasingly distressed by the unchanging, deprivation of the locals we visited and pledged to do something to let these people know that they are not forgotten and to foster lasting, tangible and meaningful improvement in their lives.
We formed the Turnaround Community Garden Alliance, an-actions-speak-louder-than-words initiative to earn the trust of the locals by getting our own hands dirty, in tandem with the locals, transforming unused properties into productive community gardens, helping them to help themselves. The gardens will be magnets to draw social services to each site on a regular basis. This clears the way for aid agencies to identify their constituents, listen to their specific needs and see to it these needs are met.
Turnaround Community Garden will be a scalable model, offering an adaptable roadmap for regular folks to proactively band together and reach out to others with less. By working side by side for a shared goal, we believe we can clear a path towards rebuilding mutual trust and healing among individuals.