School Vegetable Gardens:

Improving Children’s Nutrition from the Ground Up

INMED Partnerships for Children invites you to join us as a partner in Horta Brasil (Garden Brazil), our school vegetable garden and nutrition education program now reaching more than 95,000 vulnerable children in impoverished communities across Brazil.

Through the Garden Brazil project, we will work together to:

• Improve children’s health status by increasing their access to nutritious foods and clean water
• Educate children about good nutrition practices
• Provide an healthy example for community members to follow in their own homes

One garden feeds approximately 1,000 children,

adding essential vitamins and minerals to their school lunch—

which for many children may be their only meal of the day.

Total cost of $9,500 per year includes:

• Intensively cultivated 30 square meter garden (approximately 320 sq. ft.)
• Tools, materials and seeds for school garden
• Garden starter kits for local families
• Gardening training for children, teachers, community volunteers and local mothers
• Nutrition, food safety and menu planning training for school cafeteria workers
• Training in solar disinfection techniques to produce clean, safe water
• Dedicated garden oversight and maintenance by a lead gardener
• Staff supervision and administrative support

School Gardens Help Positive Changes Take Root

INMED’s school garden project sites are selected because of their extreme poverty levels and lack of basic infrastructure. Hunger and malnutrition are pervasive in Brazil’s urban slums and remote rural areas, where families struggle to obtain adequate food—in both quantity and nutritional quality—and poverty exacerbates children’s vulnerability to potential health threats. At the same time, individuals in our project communities have little or no knowledge of proper nutrition. As a result, children and families in our project areas have very poor eating habits, and many children have only one meal a day—their school lunch. As observed by teachers in our project sites:

“The major part of the problems come from the lack of food. The child gets weak, and doesn’t have interest in studying. In my class, there are many cases of children like that. They are always tired.”

 “The family that has six people in the house and not enough resources doesn’t eat properly. We know that the child is always hungry.”

“Some children go to bed hungry and then come to school still hungry.”

You can help. Full funding for a garden project will establish a new school garden, providing nutritious produce for approximately 1,000 children and all of the associated materials, training and operational costs described below. Individual project components may also be sponsored to support or expand existing gardens, at the funding levels noted.

Gardening tools and materials    $1,400

Each garden requires a basic equipment kit including items such as a wheelbarrow, shovel, rake, hoe, tiller, irrigation tubes, watering can, etc., as well as several hand tools such as trowels and clippers to be shared by the groups of students who plant, maintain and harvest the garden.

Seeds, compost and other supplies    $1,700

The vegetables and fruits selected for planting in the school gardens are nutritious, easy to grow in both urban and rural settings and in a variety of climatic conditions, and compatible with local tastes and culinary customs, such as lettuce, spinach, cabbage, beets, carrots, cauliflower, tomatoes, and herbs, among others.

Lead gardener’s stipend    $1,250

While children help tend and harvest the garden as part of their weekly nutrition lessons, a lead gardener supervises the daily maintenance of the garden, including organizing community volunteers to help.

Gardening/nutrition training for 35 teachers    $1,400

Through a comprehensive initial training and ongoing refreshers, teachers learn about key nutrition and gardening topics that they will introduce to their students through weekly lessons. The training is designed to incorporate a “multiplier effect” that increases the long-term impact of the project; each class of approximately 35 training participants brings together teachers from several schools, who then share what they learn with their colleagues.

INMED’s gardening and nutrition curriculum is based on a participatory educational approach, through which children are actively engaged in the process of learning through games, songs, plays, drawings, and other hands-on activities that incorporate key educational messages.

This participatory approach also facilitates the sharing of information with family and community members; for instance, students may teach their younger siblings to sing a song about healthy food choices, or they may lead their parents in developing a home garden plot. Families and community members also become involved through special events such as food fairs and recipe contests to showcase the produce harvested from the school gardens, or parades and theater presentations communicating key nutrition themes.

Nutrition/food safety training for 35 cafeteria workers    $700

All children in Brazil are entitled to receive lunch at school each day, but school menus are not standardized for nutritional content or appropriate portion sizes, and the cafeteria workers are typically untrained, unskilled women from the community.

Through INMED’s school gardens projects, cafeteria workers are trained in basic nutrition, balancing meals to incorporate adequate carbohydrates, protein and fats, optimally nutritious preparation of vegetables and other foods, appropriate portion sizes, and food safety and hygiene. Their training focuses on utilizing the produce harvested from the school gardens, although the cafeteria workers can also apply the same lessons when selecting and preparing food from local markets.

As with the teacher training, the cafeteria worker training incorporates a “multiplier effect” through which participants from multiple schools share what they learn with their colleagues. It also strengthens the women’s professional development and raises the status of their employment in the community.

Gardening training for 10 mothers    $1,400

To build on the interest in gardening and nutrition generated by the children among their families, mothers are trained in the same intensive gardening techniques and nutrition topics, so that nutritional improvements can be achieved at home as well as at school. As with the children, mothers will be engaged in participatory activities such as food fairs and recipe contests, to supplement the education they receive through training workshops.

Mothers who are respected and regarded as influential in the community will be selected to participate in the training activities, with the expectation that they will pass on their knowledge and encourage other families to develop home or community gardens.

Home garden starter kits for 10 families    $1,750

Mothers who take part in the gardening training also receive a starter kit of tools, seeds and other basic gardening materials to help them start their own vegetable gardens at home to improve their families’ nutrition and food security.

Thank you for visiting our fundraising page. Your donation is valuable to the success of our program.