Hermitage Street Community Garden, Englewood, is one of the many places NeighborSpace has helped to create to encourage healthy eating and relieving food scarcity in Chicago. The CHIditarod grant of $5,000 has supported improvements at Hermitage Street Community Garden and increased in turn the food donations made available to families in the Englewood community. Most of these donations were used by senior residents at Bethel Terrace Senior Residence at 900 West 63rd Parkway. They expanded their garden beds from 23, to now having 34 to expand the garden’s vegetable growing output. NeighborSpace estimates that 120 additional families were helped the last growing season.
Their $5,00 grant also paid for building materials and labor construction costs associated with the raised beds. To ensure healthful vegetables are grown in the new beds, we purchased landscape barrier cloth (to block out any existing toxins in the Chicago topsoil) and organic soil from lake street supply. They have added additional rain barrels and a compost system to be more self-reliant and better serve its own fertilization needs and once again demonstrate environmental best practices for the community.
NeighborSpace, the non-profit that protects Hermitage Street and 108 other Chicago community gardens on behalf of community members, provides fiscal agency to our sites to make funding like the CHIditarod grant possible. Thank you for your support of increased healthy food access in Englewood.