Seeds and Support for School Gardens Worldwide

Hi Folks, 

This update comes from our Peace Corps partner in Morocco, who you may remember from a previous report in June of 2019. Peace Corps Morocco focuses on empowering youth and local communities in remote, mostly rural areas. Gardens are created on the grounds of youth centers and boarding schools where Peace Corps volunteers use seeds as an opportunity to demonstrate lessons about the environment and agriculture. This keeps people linked to their land by nurturing an understanding of botanical life. 

Students lead the planning and production: cultivating soil, constructing garden beds, and planting seeds. During this process, the young gardeners learn about agricultural practices and environmental issues. Between their work in the gardens and accompanying lessons, they leave prepared to start their own local garden project, encouraging the community to start growing food of their own. 

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the safety of students and teachers has become paramount. Planting and regular classes have been put on hold at the youth centers and boarding schools. However, one garden at the Dar Chabaab was completed prior to the pandemic. One Peace Corps volunteer writes:

“I just want to follow up with a few notes about the Community Garden and our Environment Program, which I'm proud to say we were able to launch before life changed. Although everything came to an abrupt halt for all of us, I believe we will still be able to share with the kids some of the vegetables they planted during the season of Ramadan.”

- Mary-Elizabeth, Peace Corp Morocco Volunteer

The Community Garden and Environment Program was launched through collaborative efforts from Peace Corps Morocco and professionals at the Dar Chabaab to increase availability of local community gardens and provide education on environmental awareness and stewardship. Seeds play an integral role as an educational tool. Mary-Elizabeth continues:

“Our first class took place on Sunday, March 1st at the Dar Chabaab with planting. The planting boxes were in place and filled with compost donated by a local family. The students were assigned planting partners if they didn't already have a buddy. Then they were assigned their vegetable, given the container with the pre-soaked seeds and instructed per the manual on how to plant their vegetable in their box. Each student was also given a notebook to document through drawings and notes the development of their plant/s on a weekly basis. They were told that there would be a contest for best vegetables grown and instructed to water their plant every day. It was a wonderful little get-together for everyone”

More projects were planned to highlight local talent, like a field trip to a farm and a lecture series, including: an artist in Marrakech who uses recyclables in his art practice; an engineer working on a big dam project in the area; an engineering PhD student whose agricultural project cuts down on water use by strategically delivering water to growing crops; and a visit to the local landfill to learn where household waste is managed. 

The good news is that all of this (and more!) can still happen in the future. Dar Chabaab has the space and desire to plant a larger, community garden to complement the student planter boxes. 

We are pleased to continue our work with Peace Corps Morocco through this time of in-door confinement. They have succeeded in joining efforts with the local community leaders to provide an environmental learning project to youth center students. They have planted the seeds of change, which we believe will continue to grow after normal life resumes. It is through support like yours that SPI can continue partnerships like these all over the globe. Thank you for your trust and support of SPI and our partners.

With gratitude,

The SPI Team

Hi folks,

I truly hope this reaches you safe and well. With so many changes to our daily lives, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed just by paying attention to what’s happening closest to us. During these times, it can help to remember that we’re part of a larger, collective effort to support and bring out the best in each other. Today, we’re sharing a project story from Uganda — a project that your support has made possible. We hope it will encourage and inspire you, as it did us.

This past September, the MDRT Foundation hosted a seed packing event at their annual meeting in Australia. Their members filled over 20,000 seed packets with SPI seeds and shared those packets with new partner organizations who carried the seed throughout the world. Quaker Service Australia is one of those new partners.

About Quaker Service Australia

Quaker Service Australia (QSA) is an aid organization of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). They work in countries throughout the world, including: Cambodia, India, Indigenous Australia, Malaysia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and refugee and asylum seeking groups in Australia. QSA projects focus on health, education, and human rights with a primary focus on food security. The training and education offered through QSA partner projects help ensure that people can grow food now and for generations to come.

Like many organizations, QSA has had to adapt to workplace changes because of COVID-19:

“At QSA we are all working from home as much as possible and staying in touch remotely – we are some of the lucky ones I think, that it is possible with our work. We are keeping up with communications and support to our partners as they are working to devise ways to continue support or work with their communities through their own countries’ lockdowns as well as helping to disseminate health and safety info in the course of their work. While we have some alternative plans with partners in response to COVID-19 these have not quite been able to go ahead as of yet. In most of our project locations it is currently unsafe for them to leave the house not just because of COVID-19, but also because of authorities using means of coercion to enforce the lockdowns.”

Building a Foundation: QSA & St. Jude Family Projects

This past February and March, QSA distributed about 1,500 packets of SPI seed with their partner St. Jude Family Projects in Uganda. St. Jude offers education for the whole community, working with farmers, students, and families. Prior to Uganda’s mandated COVID distancing measures, St. Jude offered training in agroforestry, vegetable growing, preparation, value addition and marketing, seasonal crop spacing, and manure application. Droughts and floods over the past year had wiped out several prior crops, so this recent seed distribution was especially important.

Seed was also shared with three schools that maintain gardens as a classroom for students and teachers. These gardens are important training grounds (no pun intended) that also provide nutritious vegetables for school lunches. St. Jude carefully cultivates these programs, building their curriculum from the ground up:

“We select the most disadvantaged schools from many applications, do a needs assessment, pick up the numbers that we can afford each year to work with, and start working towards a collective vision with those involved.

Meetings begin with school management committees, teachers, parents, and the students themselves to introduce the program. We visit these schools every few weeks to train and monitor their developments and provide advice with proper guidance. For sustainability reasons, it is important to educate the children on nutrition and harvesting. It is amazing to see how the children take these lessons to their respective homes as ‘mini-ambassadors.’ This creates a culture of ownership, and ensures these great lessons of caring for the earth live on. Agriculture is a fruitful venture, not a living to shy away from.”

What a fantastic model for ensuring that everyone involved has the opportunity to shape the program! Ai Leen at QSA adds, “...St Jude Family Projects’ excellent and dedicated community-based trainers [planted] a trial run of SPI seeds during my visit, so they could test and observe germination prior to distributing to farmers, which also allowed them to know how to advise them.” This is clearly an experienced team who cares about their students, community, and craft.

This report includes photos from St. Jude of the most recently completed primary school project (students planting) and the currently ongoing project (tiered garden). Ai Leen and St. Jude are waiting to see what this season will bring. Nothing is certain, but we believe that the quality of care and resources that QSA and St. Jude are providing has established a critical foundation of support for local farmers and students.

Your support of this project supports local collaborations like Quaker Service Australia and St. Jude Family Projects. The work they’re doing with local schools is growing local leaders who will support their communities for generations to come. Thank you!

— The SPI Team