Elon Community Garden – Elon’s Living and Learning Laboratory

Over the past year the Elon Community Garden has achieved a high profile, both on campus and within the larger community, but the future plans for the garden are greener than ever. The Elon Community garden has truly transformed into an active living-learning laboratory because of its now integral role in numerous classes and internships highlighting its success and popularity. Currently, at least five classes per year are directly tied to the garden including Community Agriculture classes during both fall and spring, several first-year classes in spring, plus multiple garden internships year-round. Having an excellent working community garden/laboratory is an integral part of these classes and projects. The goal of this grant would be to take the garden to a new level, a kick start through an infusion of funds that can’t readily be accessed in any other way that will increase the exposure of students to the garden through more classes, internships, research projects, and group affiliations. We feel that, given the rapid growth in the past year, we need to push forward and make the garden a showplace living- learning laboratory. This would of course be in addition to increasing the diversity of work that the current classes can do out there with successful implementation of our plans for improvement as follows. This grant will enable us to do so.