| If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach a man how to fish,
you enable him to feed himself for a lifetime.
This often quoted thought is the concept behind Life Gardens: helping people around the world become more food independent and self-reliant.
Global Assist Network's Life Gardens program provides garden seeds and garden instructions to national and international organizations that are working with international village families and communities, orphanages, and schools. In addition to the seed and planting instructions, GAN provides growing and harvest instructions for each organization to use as training tools.
To ensure that these gardens yield maximum benefit in years to come, we also provide instruction on seed saving for the next season and region-appropriate food preservation techniques.
In the near future, Life Gardens’ alliance with master garden programs in the United States will provide support and assistance with technical gardening areas, such as composting, organic pest control, and others.
Sponsorship Participation
A sponsor—whether it is an idividual or group; i.e., a family, a Sunday school class, a public or private school classroom, a civic organization, a work group or business, or a cell/small group within a church—can select an area of the world they are interested in helping. Then they will select the project size they want to sponsor. Each project is based upon family units. Thus, depending on size, an orphanage or a school may need a dozen or more family units. The sponsor can provide all of the needed units in a project, or choose to help with only one unit.
Each sponsor will provide $100 per family unit to cover the cost of the garden seed, other materials, and shipping. GAN encourages the sponsor to also create some type of communication for the garden recipient, such as an encouraging letter, card, picture...the more creative the better. This lets the recipient know that they have been blessed by REAL people!
Each sponsor will receive information on the specific project they have chosen to support. Under some circumstances sponsors will be free to communicate directly with the on-the-ground organization that will be overseeing the project [restrictions may apply in some areas of the world]. Through that oversight organization the sponsor will, in many cases, also be able to communicate with the recipient family or children. [Again, there are restrictions in some areas of the world that limit this personal contact].
Organizations partnering with Global Assist Network in the Life Gardens projects will provide sponsors with updated stories about the project no fewer than twice during the first year —thus providing an ongoing understanding of the impact the sponsor's generosity has on lives in the area.
Global Assist Network will provide area-appropriate seed packets and other materials needed for each garden. GAN will also provide leadership of the on-the-ground organizations the initial information needed for preparing the soil, planting the seed, and harvesting the vegetables, as well as supplying ongoing help to them for their gardening projects.
Impact
This program will have a great impact on both the sponsoring individual or group and those receiving the garden. For those sponsoring the garden, they have a great satisfaction in having this type of opportunity to touch the lives of people from other parts of the world and make a great and long-term impact on them.
For the garden recipients, the program offers them a way to achieve a lifetime of food independence. They will know how to grow, harvest, and preserve food for themselves and their families.
Next Level
As Life Gardens projects continue to expand globally, we anticipate challenges in additional training and soil assistance throughout certain regions. We will meet these challenges, increasing our services to include volunteer gardening teams that can make short-term trips to other parts of the world to help establish gardens and gardening programs.
There may be additional service requirements in food preparation and instruction since some cultures have been without a varied diet for decades and may not be knowledgeable in the use and benefits of a variety of vegetables, herbs, and spices. Thus, GAN will build short-term teams to provide cooking classes and training sessions.
Summary
People are experiencing hunger and lacking essential nutrients in their diets all over the world. Aid groups, like Global Assist Network, send millions of pounds of food every year to meet crises situations and help people survive.
We dig water wells and build schools, community centers, and medical clinics to help bring people out of their impoverished state and make their lives better.
All of these activities are important and we are excited that GAN can participate in many of these types of projects. However, we also see a great need to teach people how to produce and preserve their own food—enabling them to reduce their reliance on aid supplies and government handouts.
Conditions in most areas are conducive to home gardening and people do not need a lot of land to provide enough food for their families. Teaching “food independence” will help build confidence and character in these people, just as educating them and providing them with ways to stay healthy do.
Adding Life Gardens to the building of schools and clinics will enable villages to eventually be self-sustaining! Those villages will not only survive, they can and will thrive and prosper.
If you are a mission or an international humanitarian/compassion organization and would like to learn more about how to become involved in this program, please contact us.
If you or your group would like to become a sponsor for this gardening program, please contact us regarding the area of the world you are interested in helping.
If you do not care what area of the world you assist, you may DONATE NOW. Be sure to designate your gift for Life Gardens. Your gift will be used in an area where the gardens are most needed.
|
