462 HALSEY COMMUNITY GARDEN

Organization Name: 462 Halsey Community Garden
About Us: 462 Halsey opened in 2012 with the goal of becoming a thriving agriculture and community center in a neighborhood that needs affordable, healthy food. In the past two years, community members at 462 Halsey faced a number of obstacles in pursuit of that goal: from inadequate water and sun, toxic soil and vicious mosquitoes to learning to farm. These challenges pushed us to explore different ways to meet our goals, resulting in a variety of programs and partnerships that benefit our slice of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. The gates at 462 Halsey are open all day from April to November, welcoming all of our neighbors to enjoy the beautiful, green space. 462 Halsey is home to Grow NYC’s Fresh Food Box Program, providing consistent, affordable, healthy food. We host educational workshops, potlucks, BBQs and movie nights. Our compost team kept 14,200 pounds of food scraps out of landfills and in our garden. In 2014, 462 Halsey underwent a complete re-design. We adopted a communal-growing model to increase our crop yield. The remodel addresses deficiencies in our soil and our inadequate sunlight. We rebuilt all of our beds and made them much deeper - a whopping 24'x 4'x 30"! The communal beds provides a more equitable access to the small space we share. Garden members and community members can now come together to learn and grow in our greatly expanded common spaces. This will allow us to grow more food and engage with our community in more comprehensive ways. The garden becomes more of a thriving community space each season.
We Participate Because: Access to food should be a right, not a privilege. At 462 Halsey we are coming together as friends and neighbors to help address the lack of healthy food in our community. We are sharing knowledge and learning new skills from each other. Adapting an urban space to be a food producing space takes a tremendous amount of work and a lot of resources. Rebuilding our beds required a lot of lumber, tons and tons of imported soil, and a lot of people to put everything into place. We urgently need to upgrade our rain water system to meet the needs of our communal plants. We need to expand our compost curing stations to accommodate the growing number of residents and businesses who compost in the garden. We have a lot of incidental needs at 462 Halsey - tools, pizza for work days, van rentals, etc. We aren't a non-profit - it's not feasible given our size - which means that we aren't eligible for many grants. We rely on your tax deductible gifts to IOBY to raise the funds that will support us as we continue to grow. Thank you! ** We set our fundraising goal much lower than we need to insure that we will raise enough (quickly!) to build our rain water system.
Website(s): 462Halsey.com
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