Sunflower Community Garden
Beginning in 1999, the Santa Rosa Recreation & Parks Department has run the Sunflower Community Garden to provide access to recreational and educational gardening opportunities to youth in at risk situations in low income and homeless areas in Santa Rosa. This garden provides horticultural training, education, and food to the youth and families attending these programs and the community at large as well as local neighborhood employment opportunities. In 2010, the City of Santa Rosa has partnered with Social Advocates for Youth (S.A.Y.) to oversee this garden and offers employment and work experience to youth and young adults.
The Youth Employment Center at SAY is happy to announce that the Sunflower Community Garden will be open for this summer season. Our mission is to empower youth to find employment and develop basic job skills that will ensure success. We provide job readiness workshops, field trips, work programs, and community service opportunities to reinforce desirable job skills. The Youth Employment Center’s Sunflower Garden offers mentoring projects that connect elementary school children with high school students during the summer months. The YEC staff also provides mentoring for high school students with Senior Service Projects.
Several volunteers have worked the past three months to get our little plot ready for production. Social Advocates for Youth is hiring 6 youth to start working in the Sunflower garden to help make it even more productive than last year!
The Sunflower crew members will be making food donations to Catholic Charities and Burbank Housing. This year the youth will collaborate with Franco’s Restaurant on Mendocino and hope to sell organic herbs at their restaurant on the weekends. The Sunflower Garden will also host the Sprigs and Sprouts program whose aim is to connect young children ages 6-11 to gardening and healthy eating.
This was all made possible with the support of City of Santa Rosa, and donations from Emerisa Gardens, Friedman’s Home Improvement, Harmony Nursery, Safeway on Mendocino, Sonoma County Sherriff’s Department Jail Industries Nursery. The hundreds of hours of volunteer work (Clean Slate participants, Medtronics, and Volunteer Center) are greatly appreciated. We would also like to thank the volunteer horticulturists Shawna Anderson & Lori Proctor, Lyle Butler & Shad Horde our construction crew.
Click here for a La Voz article on S.A.Y. and the Sunflower Garden.
(See pages 4-5.)
Click here to visit the S.A.Y. website.