By the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
Working in a community garden filled with children — and tomatoes, squash and flowers — is LaBria Lane’s favorite memory of her FoodCorps/AmeriCorps service assignment at Flint’s Brownell-Holmes STEM Academy.
“We had a hoop house and several smaller gardens in the school’s courtyards. We grew so many tomatoes in the big garden, we were able to send them home with the kids and share them with the neighbors,” she said. Planting seedlings in the school’s greenhouse — and watching them grow into plants large enough to transfer into the gardens — was a great way to engage her younger students, she added.
As a member of the Flint FoodCorps, Lane used the gardens as a way of fulfilling her charge to create “a healthy school, where every child is nourished and ready to learn.”
