The Giving Garden
Caitlyn is known as a kind, caring, and compassionate person at
her high school. She knew she wanted to use these skills and character
qualities in developing a Gold Award project. She discovered that the
mission of her local homeless shelter, the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter,
is to house people and care for them while they are guests. The
shelter believes the people it serves have inherent strength, building
relationships of mutual trust and respect are important, and that
housing is a right for all people. Caitlyn felt that mission of the
shelter paired with her values and passions and decided that this
organization was who she wanted to partner with for her Gold Award
project.
To do this, she connected with the shelter’s
director and volunteer coordinator and discovered that the shelter
feeds 25 to 50 households a day and runs a community food pantry that
is open to the public. She also discovered that the shelter would need
their own small farm to make a dent in their food needs. So, she
decided to develop a raised-bed vegetable garden at the shelter where
she could not only help feed guests fresh and nutritious food, but
also teach them how to plant, tend, and harvest it themselves—skills
that would benefit them long into the future.
Upon
further research, Caitlyn discovered that a large percentage of
homeless persons are homeless due to trauma and that gardening can
provide much more than edible produce; gardening can be a form of
therapy, allowing people to forget their traumas, even for just a
little while, and remind people of what they’re capable of doing.
Studies have shown that gardening allows people to practice
mindfulness and can be a form of meditation that allows for
healing.
Even though Caitlyn’s project was delayed
because of the coronavirus pandemic, her contribution to the homeless
shelter came at a time when the shelter had to change the way it
operated to help serve its' guests. To ensure the sustainability of
her project, Caitlyn worked with guests of the shelter to teach them
how to garden, choose healthy food to eat, and educated the youth at
the shelter about fresh, healthy produce. Additionally, she provided
the shelter with a manual on how to start plants from seeds indoors
and transplant them outside and provided seeds, plant starting
materials, and tools to the shelter to start gardening with again next
spring. According to the shelter’s director “Caitlyn’s project really
does supplement the shelter’s mission. Projects like this are perfect
because it gives our guests something to do, it provides food, which
is what we need for our guests, and that is never going to change. I
appreciate people thinking outside the box.”
Caitlyn said
the biggest obstacle and challenge in her project was the pandemic,
but attributes her success to her troop leader, who met with her
weekly and helped keep her motivated and inspired, despite the
pandemic, which reminded Caitlyn of one of her guiding principles:
“The way I see it is that there is always someone worse off than I am
so I want to help as often as I can.”
Gold Award Girl Scout, Caitlyn
26 Jun 2021
