Strengthen the School Community

School Food Gardens are collaborative by nature and bring communities together. School food gardens provide ideal opportunities for community development and engagement in an experiential learning environment. Gardens can support cross-aged buddies programs and function as intergenerational bridges, creating important opportunities for older adults and children to socialize and transfer ideas from one generation to the next. School food gardens provide a perfect opportunity to apply this good practice to strengthen school communities, enhance food literacy across generations and cultures, and celebrate the contributions of all.

Download Full Guiding Practices - PDF

Resources for Strengthen the School Community

See all

Featured

Asset-Mapping Worksheet for School Gardens

This worksheet will help school gardens create an asset map of their surrounding community as part of the Grow Eat Learn program.

Asset-Mapping Worksheet for Community Organizations

This worksheet will help community organizations create an asset map of their surrounding community as part of the Grow Eat Learn program.

Planning a Harvest Meal

This document provides a great action plan for getting started in planning a harvest meal, and provides links to harvest meal stories from Green Schools in Nova Scotia.

Preserving the Garden Harvest

Take a look at this action plan for preserving your harvest and gain inspiration from the tips and tricks throughout, including preparing sauerkraut or dehydrating veggies.

Why Volunteer? Poster

This poster can aid in recruiting new volunteers for a school food garden.

Volunteer Thank-You Ideas

Take a look through this document to inspire some fun and creative ways to celebrate your volunteers.

Volunteer Thank-You Letter Template

Volunteers are such an integral part of the garden and it is important that they know that. Try using this letter of thanks to express your gratitude.

Volunteer Recruitment Template

This volunteer recruitment template would be great to keep in your school food garden binder and use when you start building your team.

In the Garden - Basinview School

Hear primary students talk about what gardeners do and what the school food garden means to them.

Roving Reporter: Weeding Wednesday

Join Nourish's Roving Reporter as he visits a school food garden to talk about how they sustain it through the year and over the summer.

Roving Reporter: Growing a Community

This video showcases a school that values their food garden as an integral part of their school community.

Roving Reporter: Stone Soup

This video tells the story of a school that embodied the value of sharing as they prepare to make a school-wide meal with their garden harvest.

Guide to Canning Your Harvest

This colorful toolkit walks you through safe home canning - a healthy and low waste practice that students could benefit from learning about!

Curriculum Connection

Valuing Volunteers: Explore the ideas of volunteerism and community with the class. Students can engage in a range of creative and purposeful writing activities, such as creating invitations and recruitment letters, writing volunteer role descriptions and penning thank you cards or poems to the community members that give their time to helping the garden grow.

Story from the Field: Growing Together

When we were finished doing the work and the kids were taking a break on the grass, we got a visit from a lady who lives across the street from the school. She came over with cherries and sliced watermelon for the kids. It was so wonderful, we sat on the grass and chatted, and had an impromptu picnic! She was a member of the local garden club and said she would keep and eye on the garden for us over the summer. We had left over manure and told her that we would leave it there for any of the members of her garden club to help themselves! - Community Volunteer