Monsignor Edward Pace High School is a private Catholic school with over 1,200 students. The student body is richly diverse with Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, and newly added an ESE Department among others. Although the school is predominantly Catholic, some of the students are of other religious traditions, and for that reason the garden is designed to showcase several different religious traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism and Shintoism. In a practical sense the garden will provide an individual a quiet place to pray, meditate, or read or provide clubs or even some classes with an open air meeting spot.

The Anime Club, or Japanese Animation Club, has always been called a group of slackers so we decided to prove the school wrong and undertake the most ambitious project ever constructed at our school. We have been actively working towards the project's completion with several club members giving up their summers to work at fund raisers and collect donations. At the beginning of the school year will we begin to sell pizza and bake goods again and continue to host our monthly video game arcades.

The idea for the garden came to us from the several different Japanese gardens that our club has studied but it quickly grew into much more than just a garden. The garden came to symbolize the largest project every attempted by any club in our school and as a way for us to grow in our relationship with God. For us the hardest part of the project is the allocation of funds. Because we are a non-profit organization we must rely on fund raisers such as weekly pizza and bake good sales, in addition to hosting video game arcades monthly and even holding a teacher auction to collect money but it has proved challenging to reach our $4,000 goal. We are also currently working with several area construction companies and home improvement stores to collect donations. Once we have collected roughly half of the necessary funds we'll start to break ground and begin construction in three phases. The first phase will include the Torii, or Japanese ceremonial gate, the gazebo, creating the stone flooring for the wishing well and laying the ground work for the gravel pathways. The second stage will include planting, the completion of the wishing well and the creation of the meditation bridge with connecting sand area in the middle of the garden. The last step will consist of final decorative touches such as the donations plaque and remembrance markers.

Others can help by either donating supplies or their time in helping us build the garden.