Youth Villiages Gets Gardening Grant

The Captain Planet Foundation has awarded Youth Villages a grant of $11,400 to teach organic gardening to children and families receiving help through the private nonprofit organization.

The grant will be divided equally between Youth Villages’ programs in Georgia, where funds will be used to enhance an existing organic vegetable, herb and flower garden on the Youth Villages-Inner Harbour Campus in , and in Mississippi, where the grant will allow the organization to start its Gardens in the Gulf program.

“We are thrilled to be working with the Captain Planet Foundation on this pilot program to provide both environmental education and organic backyard gardens to the children, families and young adults we help in Georgia and Mississippi,” said Mary Norman, Youth Villages Georgia director of development. “This will be a wonderful learning experience for our children and families and a chance for them to supplement their diet with homegrown fruits and vegetables.”

The garden project will kick off Oct. 13 when representatives from Captain Planet Foundation and Youth Villages Mississippi staff and volunteers will meet at the Youth Villages-Inner Harbour Campus to participate in an organic gardening training class. They will also learn how the Youth Villages garden is integrated into the campus school’s curriculum.

“Youth Villages is on the cutting edge of transforming the way children and youth shape their future,” said Christina Stevens, interim executive director of Captain Planet Foundation. “Their mission of helping children and families live successful lives means living sustainable lives and that is where our goals intersect. Our mission at Captain Planet is to empower children and youth to understand and care for their environment through active hands-on learning experiences. We see this as a great and growing partnership.”      

Gardens in the Gulf will kick off in Mississippi in late October, when Youth Villages staff  and volunteers will begin working with the families served by the organization to teach them the basics of organic gardening.

The project will continue in the spring, when the focus will be the planting of backyard gardens. Learning the skills necessary for organic gardening will allow the families served by Youth Villages to have homegrown fruits and vegetables on their tables.

Youth Villages Georgia is a private nonprofit organization dedicated to helping emotionally and behaviorally troubled children and their families live successfully through intensive in-home services, residential treatment and a transitional living program to help former foster youth make a successful transition into independent adulthood.

Youth Villages’ intensive in-home services program helps children and families where they need help most: in their own homes. By strengthening the entire family, the organization’s intensive in-home services program helps prevent children from being placed into foster care or residential treatment, and also helps children who have already been placed outside the home to reunify quickly and safely with a member of their birth family.

Youth Villages opened its Atlanta office in 2008. The Youth Villages-Inner Harbour Campus in Douglasville has been helping Georgia’s most troubled children and teens through residential treatment since 1962.   

Youth Villages’ focus on strengthening families consistently produces an 80 percent success rate of children living successfully at home even two years after completing a Youth Villages program. Named one of the Top 50 Nonprofits to Work For by Nonprofit Times and Best Companies Group in 2010 and 2011, Youth Villages has been recognized by Harvard Business School and U.S. News & World Report, and was identified by The White House as one of the nation’s most promising results-oriented nonprofit organizations.

For more information about Youth Villages, visit www.youthvillages.org.

The mission of Captain Planet Foundation is to promote and support high quality, educational programs that enable children and youth to understand and appreciate our world through learning experiences that engage them in active hands-on projects to improve the environment in their schools and communities.