The Home Gardening Project
Foundation
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The Home Gardening Project |
The History and the Future
of the Home Gardening Project Foundation
UPDATE: As of the fall of '98 we have twelve new
garden building organizations operating in places like Boston, Austin, Arcata,
CA and Spruce Pine, NC. Currently we are trying to raise $335K to help fund
their expansion, and to fund 15 or 20 new outfits. Any money sent will be
turned into vegetable gardens. If you would like to help us start new projects,
giving gardens to the poor and the elderly, please go to the Funding
page for details.
We started our 14 years of garden building with a $5,000.00 grant from
HUD in 1984, and built 1400 new vegetable gardens in the Portland, Oregon
area. We built 21 gardens in the spring of '84, 23 in '85, and in ever increasing
numbers until our apogee in '95 of building 165 gardens during a ten week
spring. In our final season in Portland (1996), we built 112 new gardens
and resupplied some 200 other households with seeds, starts, manure and
fertilizer. Our average budget was $82K per year, raised from charitable
trusts and foundations.
In 1996, we decided to turn over the garden-building in Portland to
a new organization, The Portland Garden Project, to carry on the work there.
Dan's arthritis, from too many wet seasons and too many wheelbarrow loads
of heavy rain-soaked soil, encouraged him to leave building and pursue an
idea he'd long been considering: to turn The Home Gardening Project into
a foundation with the goal of raising start-up money for new garden projects
across the country. Many people have begun projects, following our example,
but we have heard from many others for whom the task of getting first-year
funding has been too much. The Home Gardening Project Foundation is raising
that start-up money, and locating and training new garden builders. They
will receive a first-year grant from the HGP Foundation, and the second
year a matching grant, to start them off raising money locally for their
future efforts.
Over the past years some 25 to 30 other Projects have
started in other cities: Olympia, Eugene, Sacramento, L.A., Denver, Tallahassee,
Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, Austin, Nova Scotia, and other cities; and our
sterling reputation continues to increase. We've been nominated as a Point
of Light, won the second annual Garden Grow Award (the first went to Robert
Rodale), received Renew America's Award for Environmental Sustainability,
received the "Best Social Invention Award" from The Institute
for Social Inventions in London. News of the Project has appeared in National
Geographic, Organic Gardening Magazine, Utne Reader, The Sun, Der Plunkt,
and a wide variety of other periodicals and newspapers including The Congressional
Record.
In its September 1997 issue, the Smithsonian
Magazine devoted a feature article to our work.
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