Community Garden

The Shanti Uganda Society is thrilled to announce our plans currently underway to design and operate a refreshed and expanded community garden site! The garden will be operated partly on the land which presently surrounds the birth house compound, as well as on a newly purchased lot of undeveloped land being added onto Shanti’s current site, totalling approximately 3 acres.

Shanti’s vision for this project is to implement a teaching and demonstration garden that aims to benefit pregnant women, new mothers and teen girls, as well as the greater community in the rural Nsasi village and beyond. Through monthly workshops and demonstration sessions, participants will learn about the benefits of organic agriculture for nutrition and dietary biodiversity, soil fertility, compost best practices, irrigation; particularly vital considering the climactic conditions in Nsasi and Kasana districts, located just 30 kilometers from the equator.

Sustainable development and grassroots community engagement by way of organic agriculture best practices hold huge potential as measures of climate change mitigation. An overarching focus of the garden workshops will be to inspire passion for sustainable attitudes and environmentally-conscious living, with the vision of these behaviours permeating from our target group to a further reach, and thus a greater impact.

These workshops will be complimented with interactive training sessions teaching how to implement these gardening practices on small-scales in participants’ backyards, for example. Shanti plans to run 12 monthly workshops over the next year starting in March with an aim to reaching 360 pregnant and new mothers, as well as engaging other members of the wider community.

Our plan for the garden itself is to operate a permaculture site based in the core principles of organic agriculture and sustainability best practices. Permaculture is a method and ideology of organic agriculture by which the farmer works with the land and nature, rather than takes away from it through use of chemicals and industrial farming techniques. A main goal of permaculture is to grow resilient, low-intensive, and high-yielding crop varieties using the resources available to produce the best quality crops. Respecting the natural ecology and land that you have to work with and using the resources available in the given environment are key permaculture principles.

We are delighted to announce this exciting new project and cannot wait to keep you updated as the ideas are planted and seeds begin to grow – figuratively and literally! For this initial launch fundraiser, we have set a goal of $4,000. These funds will go to covering payment for professional training of Shanti’s Ugandan staff – our groundskeeper, Kato and nutritionist, Ritah – so that they will be able to lead community garden workshops, the purchase of resources on teaching community-wide workshops on topics such as irrigation and compost, the purchase of seedlings for our nursery garden beds, and others materials for workshops.

Overall Shanti’s vision for the community garden project is to inspire passion for sustainable living, starting with a focus on nutrition and organic gardening through community engagement and empowerment. Stay tuned for updates and photos on our progress!