Homeless Create Organic Rooftop Garden To Feed Themselves
The homeless deserve to eat fresh, nutritious fruit and vegetables too!
Inner city residents in the poorest neighborhoods often have difficulty getting access to fresh vegetables and fruit. This is especially the case for the homeless living in shelters or on the streets.
The Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless decided to change that by encouraging it’s residents to develop an organic rooftop garden.
The garden boasts 80 raised beds that produce an abundance of healthy vegetables such as carrots, collards, kale, lettuces and squash. There are fruit trees too, a beehive for pollinating the crops, and rainwater is harvested for watering the beds.
The rooftop garden, which was first established in 2009, serves as a means to teach homeless people about urban food production and sustainable technologies, while also giving them the chance to feed fellow residents, according to the group’s website.
Carl Hartrampf is a volunteer with the Task Force and has been instrumental in the garden’s creation.
“The idea is to produce enough to feed the residents something green and healthy daily,” Carl told Vice.
The garden not only provides nutritious food for the residents, enhancing their health and wellbeing, but they are also learning valuable skills in gardening, marketing and sustainable living.
The trainees are all resident-volunteers at the shelter, and are graduates or currently participating in the Truly Living Well program. It’s an agricultural program that brings fresh, nutritionally dense produce to the community.
Participants benefit from eating healthful fruits and vegetables, and also obtaining competitive job skills that will serve them in the future.
The funded program prepares them for careers in entrepreneurial farming and marketing, and also certifies them to train future participants.
Carl Hartrampf Talks Us Through The Creation of the Rooftop Garden
Watch the video to learn how the garden was developed, how it is maintained and the food it provides for the homeless.
To learn more about the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, check out their website here.
Source: Huffington Post
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Image 3 source: video screenshot
