Little Green Fingers is an innovative community garden program especially designed for families with children under 5-years old. We serve low-income neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County to provide access to fresh fruit and vegetables and nutrition education to help address the growing obesity epidemic. Too many communities in LA don't have affordable or even available healthy food options. By helping families learn to grow healthy food, we hope to encourage healthier eating habits.
Little Green Fingers is working to address the obesity epidemic in LA County, where 1 in 5 children are overweight or obese, by providing affordable access and exposure to healthy foods and healthy living. In South and East Los Angeles, only 1 grocery store exists for every 6,000 residents (versus West LA where there is 1 for every 3,800 residents). Additionally in East LA, only 18 percent of grocery stores sell fresh fruits and vegetable of good quality.
Little Green Fingers is a community garden collaborative designed for low-income, at-risk children and their families to address the growing obesity epidemic. By providing access to ongoing supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables (a minimum of 6,000 pounds per garden per year), along with nutrition education, the gardens will contribute to young children and their families leading healthier lives and maintaining healthier weights.
In addition to growing community gardens, the project has a unique robust health evaluation component where children and their parents will be interviewed about their eating habits and food choices and kids will have body mass index (BMI) measurements over the course of four years to study their whether they gain or lose weight as a result of participating in the garden. The Little Green Fingers initiative can help transform vacant urban spaces into vibrant community gardens for families.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
