Ideas Behind the Project

The challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities designed to ensure that their ways of life and systems do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. The ecosystems of the natural world are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. There is no waste in these ecological communities, thus matter cycles continually through the web of life. The diversity and cooperation among its members is the source of its community's resilience. Being ecologically literate means understanding these basic principles of organization and being able to embody them in the daily life of human communities. The Charleston Area Children's Garden Project develops these mini-communities in each garden. Children take part in season-long learning experiences where plants are the entry point into discoveries of all kinds; where work, tools, imagination, responsibility, interconnectedness, and shared effort build a base for learning in school and in life. Children's gardens become a continually evolving place of pride and ownership-gardens created through the initiative of families and friends who live nearby, the organizations to which they belong, and the institutions that are part of everyday life in the neighborhood. Children's gardens provide a common focus for the diverse energies and interests of people from different places and backgrounds, of different ages and skills. New relationships flourish, and a sense of community membership becomes inherent.

Our Objectives

The overall Project goal is multi-purpose. Using an edible garden as the venue, the Charleston Area Children's Garden Project (CACGP) strives to decrease the incidence of childhood obesity and childhood diabetes, to increase knowledge in youth and their parents regarding nutrition and health, to increase academic knowledge in the areas of math and science and to increase awareness of human impact on the environmental community.

Objectives:

To decrease childhood obesity through prevention education taught by means of an outdoor classroom.
To expose both children and adults to fruits and vegetables (through growing and eating.)
To foster the understanding of math and science and its relationship to nature.
To educate and exhibit the correlation between eating junk foods and lack of exercise to ill-health and disease.
To bring real food from farm to school to home.
To involve children in a "learning community" that begins with a garden and extends to everyday life, both in and out of the classroom.
To build respect for the knowledge, skills, and experiences that each of us can contribute to neighborhood life.
To widen the connections between neighborhoods, schools, local government, and the larger community.