Knox County Community Gardens & Growers' Alliance
3907 Martin Luther King Jr Ave, Suite 107
Knoxville, TN 37914
Contact Information:
Erica Lisowe
erica.lisowe@knoxgardenalliance.org,
(919) 760-7647
Nick Thompson
nick.thompson@knoxgardenalliance.org
(865) 384-9761
Mission:
As a community-driven organization, the Knox County Community Gardens and Grower’s Alliance (“the Alliance”) is dedicated to fighting and eliminating food insecurity, promoting healthy living, and empowering our members to grow, harvest, and distribute fresh produce to our underserved community. Since 2021 it has been our mission to serve and support community gardens and growers in Knox County so that they can better address and eliminate food insecurity in our community.
We believe that by having easy access to fresh healthy produce, individuals’ physical and mental health will improve. Our focus on education and youth development is at the core of our mission, and we are partnering with other organizations to create a nutritional education community center to support their programs.
We are working to eliminate the food insecurity in the food desert that is the 37914/37915 ZIP Code areas. These areas experience food insecurity at a rate of 26% compared to the overall food insecurity rate of 11.4% for Knox County. 37915 ranks 5th in most impoverished ZIP Codes in Tennessee at 53.8%. The community wants and needs more community gardens and fresh produce to try to eliminate the problem of living in a food desert and with food insecurity.
The Alliance has a new School Garden Program focused on connecting, establishing and sustaining intentional, responsively-designed outdoor educational gardens that work towards three goals. These goals are: provide a secure source of food for students, bolster state curricula with engaging lessons in an outdoor environment, and support community development in the school’s neighborhood. Existing school garden programs are invited to join our School Garden Alliance, where they can be connected with resources and other school garden programs.
Education Programs:
Student Education – After school programs, At school - class time programs, Field Trips / Day trips, Weekend / evening programs, Extra-curricular garden engagement opportunities during downtime (recess, lunch, Core Extension, small groups)
Program Details:
We offer a wide range of programming to support education and community building in the greenspace. This can include but is not limited to:
- offering lessons that support classroom learning objectives in outdoor environment (PreK-12)
- offering guidance and hands-on support for teachers/staff to use the greenspace in their own lessons
- supporting garden or greenspace clubs at schools
- leading service-learning projects with students (3rd-12th) and/or volunteers
- leading community volunteer days in the garden space
- offering spaces for families to use outside of school hours, etc.
This programming is based on needs expressed by school personnel, families, students, and community stakeholders.
Placemaking:
We offer two placemaking opportunities for school campuses:
1. Community-led educational greenspace design that is informed by needs expressed by school administration, faculty/staff, parents/families, students, and community stakeholders.
These designs can include any and all of the following: vegetable gardens, native ecosystem gardens/plantings, pollinator gardens, foodscaping, hardscaping to support outdoor education/community building, campus beautification, wide range of possibilities. All designs include educational components (i.e. signage, interactive areas, nature-based manipulatives to use in classroom lessons)
2. Maintenance for greenspace, building capacity for community to take ownership in space. We teach communities how to care for their spaces, beginning with us taking responsibility for the bulk of the maintenance, then building capacity for others to join the team, eventually graduating the space to where the community will be able to care for the space with us acting as a resource hub (managing space for --> managing space with --> overseeing management of space --> being a resource for the management of the space)
Educator Programs:
Work with educators to find ways for them to incorporate greenspace into their regular rhythm; offer educational resources/connections to programs that support families wanting to grow their own food.
Working with educators to demonstrate how they can use the greenspace to tie back to their grade level standards in all subjects, building capacity and confidence for them to use the greenspace independent of us, but also offering services to teach in the outdoor space to bridge the gap.
Website and Social Media:
@knoxgardenalliance - Instagram, Facebook