Great news! Surveys showed that many parent volunteers hunger for more training and connection to one another. Ask and you shall receive. ✨ We were awarded a grant through Boulder County Sustainable Food and Ag to pay 40 parent garden leads / volunteers a $100 stipend to receive 5-hours of training this March/April. Interested? Read on!
Dates/Format:
This training will take place in two parts:
Part one: March 8, 4-5:30pm—via zoom. This session will be concurrent with our similar teacher training, so you’ll be joined by BVSD garden teachers who’ll be receiving professional development credits.
Part two: April 9, 12-3:30pm—outdoors at BCSIS/High Peaks Elementary. Snacks/beverages provided.
Why a parent training? Why a teacher training?
Garden to Table empowers school communities with gardens and curriculum to engage all students in experiential outdoor education. We are half of a partnership. The school (parents and teachers) are the other half. Without you, the gardens would flounder, so we want to be sure you feel well equipped to fill and grow your role as a parent lead or parent volunteer in the garden. This will be a chance to meet parents at other schools and learn answers to questions you’ve been asking about your child’s school garden or gardening generally.
We’d love your support getting the word out to teachers about our parallel training (through BVSD) in which they can receive professional development credit or a stipend. If both parents and teachers receive more training and support we know each school garden can better fulfill its potential in 2022 and beyond.
Could you help by sharing this info to others you know and sharing with your school’s administration to include in newsletter?
What will the training cover?
Three Garden to Table staff will guide you to make best use of your child’s (or childrens’) school garden.
Mandi Leigh, our Garden and Curriculum Coordinator at 6 schools and PhD Candidate in Education Reform, will share strategies for group management in experiential outdoor classrooms. How can we break hierarchical routine and reposition the garden as the teacher and the students as the experts? Mandi will discuss ways of being in the garden with children that are trauma-informed, inquiry-based, and that foster relationship with planet. She’ll help us learn to analyze curriculum through four lenses (learner, teacher, subject matter, and milieu) in order to understand what makes some classes in the garden really flow for everyone.
Lindsey LeCuyer, our Program Director, will help participants learn how to make the most of the Garden to Table website and give an overview of resources. She’ll give updates on the new curriculum we’re developing to meet new science standards and answer any questions about scheduling lessons and how we go about choosing date ranges for given lessons. She’ll also share volunteer recruitment strategies!
Laurel Smith, our Garden Director, will explain and demonstrate our best practices for building healthy soil and generating bountiful vegetable harvests. We’ll discuss what makes our approach to gardening “sustainable” and ecologically-savvy. Participants will learn where and from whom these practices originated, and ideas on how to support students from all backgrounds to enjoy growing food and learning in the garden.
How will the stipends be awarded?
Stipends will be given out after the second training day for the first 40 registrants who are able to complete the full five hours. We’d like to have 2-3 parents sign up from each of our partner schools. The first 2 parents from each school will receive the $100 stipend, and then we’ll move to a third parent from schools with 3 interested parents until we reach 40. It is a stipulation of the grant we received to pay for this training that we will prioritize parents from our partner schools, but if we have fewer than 40 registrants we would like to offer this stipend to people who are not parents at our partner schools, but who are connected to other school gardens!
Questions? Please let us know. We’ll do our best to get back in touch promptly. info@gardentotable.org