Mission & Vision

The Mission

The Children's Garden Network – Campaign 2010 – was established to help communities grow gardens and garden education programs at every school and youth organization in Rhode Island by the year 2010.

The Vision
By the year 2010, there will be a garden at every school and youth organization in Rhode Island.

Multi-dimensional and Accessible to all
These gardens will come in a variety of sizes, shapes and forms – from in classroom terrariums, planters and window boxes, to raised beds and full grown plots on the grounds. They will produce fruits and vegetables, shrubs and plants in all manner of life forms in places that will be accessible to anyone with a hankering to get into the action.

Places for People
The gardens will be neighborhood meeting places, quiet havens or noisy markets for the exchange of goods and sentiments.

Inspiration
They'll inspire artistic expression, soulful writing, and hands-on digging in the dirt fun. They'll serve as soothing landscapes and meditative settings, backdrops for pictures of people and things at work and play. And they will have a lot to do with growing the next generation of children and the one after that.

Common Ground
Ultimately, a garden at every school will give us common ground, a centerpiece for capacity building and good will, in every city, town and village from one end of Rhode Island to the next. People will flock here to see these gardens and by 2010 it will seem as if every man, woman and child has sprouted something magical. And they will wonder "how'd we do that?"

How, indeed!

It's Time
This will happen because it can and it should. Every resource necessary to make it so is available. The sentiment is strong that to do so is increasingly essential to children's growth and development, to education's ability to broaden its reach and scope, and to our communities' fervent desire to reclaim our rural souls and heritage.

It's Already Happening
And it will happen because in ways, it has already begun. Gardeners, teachers, local businesses and organizations of many stripes are at work in various stages on school and community gardens. Partnerships are forming, resources are being identified. In addition to schools, after-school and summer programs are looking for new activities - and gardens fit that bill, too.

But much more needs to be done if a garden at every school is to happen in the next few years.

A Purpose
The current generation of kids does not know where food and greenery come from. Many children may never plant anything in their lifetimes or watch something grow to fruition. In fact, whole communities have stopped growing things. But gardens teach us things. Important things. About the cycles of life, about the seasons of our own lives.

A garden at every school will nurture children's awareness, confidence and connections to the natural world, promote hands-on, lifelong learning and foster literacy about many things. Connected to the classroom, gardens will be an exciting platform for learning. As many teachers have discovered, gardens give school subjects tangible real-life and real-time form and context in ways that "chalk talk," by the book classroom experiences cannot.

The Future
There will be jobs and careers born in these gardens and a future work force to keep Rhode Island green and growing. If math and science are critical to children's future, it will be gardens that provide important tone and texture to their lives. The often flat and bare school landscapes and interiors are a relic of post-war minimalist style of architecture and design and inspire little. But RI is a garden state, an agricultural and horticultural state and like the rest of the nation, gardening is now the number one leisure-time activity. Garden clubs, home gardeners, master gardeners and our farmers and nurserymen and women all keep RI beautiful and bountiful.

It's time for the places where we educate and recreate our children to reflect that.

So what are we waiting for?

A Plan
Historically, a passionate teacher or a dedicated local citizen started a school garden, only to be caught up in the sheer magnitude of trying to maintain it. One person doing all the work from January to June and then losing momentum and control of the weeds when classes ended. What has been missing is not the will, but the way. A master plan that could be customized for any situation and that provided local infrastructure to ensure that gardens were supported throughout the seasons by the community - long after school kids stopped thinking about them.

This is that plan – the Children's Garden Network.

A Goal
Gardens are year-round places with year-round challenges. Keeping RI's communities beautiful and bountiful are mutually inclusive goals but both demand effort and inspiration and a generational continuum of knowledge, values and skills. A garden at every school moves us closer to those goals, and increases the number of us that will be dedicated to achieving them throughout our lifetimes and beyond.