Lots of Compassion Garden Grants
Lots of Compassion is our national initiative to celebrate and empower those using the goodness of the garden to grow compassion in their own backyard. By offering financial support and educational resources, we’re helping people across the country turn vacant lots into gardens for community growth.
From Vacant Lots to Gardens for Community Growth
From garden-inspired scents to garden-inspired communities, Mrs. Meyer’s believes one garden can grow a lot. Meet our garden grant recipients and see how they are gardening their way to happier, healthier communities.
Year 2 Grant Recipients
Kristen Weeks: Erie Food Policy Advisory Council
Erie, Pennsylvania
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Well, first and foremost, were going to show up every day. Were going to build community by showing those that are watching. So were here, that were not going anywhere, that we will be there with food for them. Well give them, help them with the things they need. You know, anything that we can answer questions, you know, anything that we can do to provide a nourishing meal. Its really just about being available and present to really show people like, we see you. We see you. We love you and youre worthy. And were not going to go anywhere. Were devotional to you. And thats really important. And thats the biggest way is just by showing up. Thats all we can do every day. Lets show up. Thank you.
Marta Flores: BACR (Monument First 5 Center)
San Rafael, California
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Having a garden will help grow compassion in our community in many ways. First it would bring more awareness about their environment and help them recognize the needs of others and the importance of healthy ecosystems. It would also teach families to work together, bringing people from different cultures together. Families will feel a sense of belonging as they see the impact they create working in the garden. The community would also have the opportunity to learn new skills, such as what it takes to create a garden and provide maintenance to it, they would also learn about different plants and how they prosper. It would encourage families to eat healthier as they get to harvest what they grow, and encourage them to also start going to farmers market or even starting mini gardens they can maintain in their homes.
Art DeMeo: Western Pennsylvania Conservancy
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
In recent years, Perry Street has seen its share of crime and vandalism. The community members have made a great effort to work with the city of Pittsburgh to clean the street up and address the drug issues that have plagued the area. This publicly accessible garden will stand as a symbol of the community’s efforts and show others that the people who live here care about the place they live in. It will also serve as a memorial for those community members who have lost their lives to drugs and offer a peaceful place for reflection.
Melissa Fratello: Tucson Audubon Society
Tuscon, Arizona
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The Community Habitat Hub at Luna y Sol Cafe will serve as a welcoming, publicly accessible place to build community, learn, and be inspired in a safe space surrounded by nature. At present, there aren’t any dedicated spaces in South Tucson to gather with friends and neighbors in a public garden setting. Activating the space with educational, multi-generational programming and resources to learn about local plants and wildlife will help strengthen the growing connections among nature and neighbors already sprouting in South Tucson. In the lead up to its grand opening in Fall 2024, Luna y Sol Cafe has “poured love into the soil” at its forthcoming business and non-profit space to build community and compassion. Run by South Tucson locals Selina and Abraham Barajas, Luna y Sol Cafe has hosted numerous community events in partnership with the City of South Tucson Public Works Department, United Way of Southern Arizona, University of Arizona, Mini Poderosas, Barrio Restoration, and Tucson Audubon including a clean-up and initial tree-planting event to prepare the site for future conversion into a community garden and habitat hub. With funding from this grant, Barrio Restoration and Tucson Audubon will continue to grow compassion by deepening a shared connection to neighborhood nature by: hosting co-created clean-ups and educational events, teaching workshops, and expanding access to nature and native plant resources through our self-guided habitat tour, tool library, and bilingual (English/ Spanish) maintenance and habitat pocket guide.
Bishop Randall: Civic Works, Inc
Baltimore, Maryland
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Civic Works sees this combined garden/putting green as an excellent opportunity to cultivate self- and other-directed compassion – and flavorful herbs – by coaching 20 young residents of Baltimore’s Arlington community in transforming and enjoying the space as a team. We strongly believe that when community members work together in environments where everyone can contribute in a meaningful way, communities thrive. Arlington wants their kids to thrive and so do we. @The House, Inc. is providing kids with opportunities through Putting with a Purpose, their six-week summer program for youth. Putting with a Purpose combines the team-building experience of learning to golf with healthy communication skills development and nutrition education. The program aims to strengthen young people’s relationships and prepare them for a better future. Putting with a Purpose sees each child has unique qualities worth nurturing and bright futures ahead of them, and works to maximize who each child can be. Resilient kids still need support, and Putting with a Purpose provides emotional and social wellness coaching in an engaging, structured environment. Through Putting with a Purpose, kids can feel empowered to be and become themselves, and treat themselves and others with compassion even in emotionally challenging circumstances. Civic Works and Putting with a Purpose will create a beautiful and nourishing outdoor environment for kids to practice golf while nurturing camaraderie, communication skills, and sportsmanship. An herb and rain garden alongside the putting green will provide healing sensory experiences growing healthy fresh food surrounded by pollinators and peers.
Melanie Stefanovic: Cocoplum Nature School
Delray Beach, Florida
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Our garden will foster self-compassion for those we serve as well as compassion within families and across our community through gardening programs rooted in love and focused on eco-healing. In a space where compassion, love, and eco-healing are core values, gardening is not a hobby, but a way of being more connected to nature, self, and others. We live in a diverse city, and through the sharing of time, energy, and knowledge, participants hearts, minds, and lives will be enriched. Moreover, through our programs, participants will experience the joy of experimenting, persisting, learning from mistakes, and harvesting the fruits of their labor. The practices of gratitude and mindfulness will become embedded in their daily lives. When children and their caregivers are able to learn and grow in harmony with the natural world, the benefits ripple outward, enriching families, communities, and future generations. Since 2021, we have seen firsthand the holistic benefits of gardening as a family and in community in the form of mental and physical wellbeing. Additionally, our compassion for all living things will be cultivated through the pursuit of Florida Friendly Landscape and Certified Wildlife Habitat designations, which we will aim to obtain through planting wildlife friendly shrubs. When gardening programs are thoughtfully constructed and implemented intentionally to cultivate compassion for self and others, everyone – the gardeners, the plants, the animals, and the whole community – thrive.
Cheron Pitchford: Summerhill Neighborhood Development Corporation
Atlanta, Georgia
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Our community garden is more than just a place to grow plants; it’s a space where our diverse neighborhood will come together and connect. Imagine students from Georgia State University working alongside senior residents, families from low-income housing, and business professionals—all united by a shared love of gardening. This shared space will allow us to learn from each other, share our experiences, and build lasting relationships. We are committed to creating opportunities for connection. Our garden events will be designed to bring people of all ages and backgrounds together, breaking down barriers and building a stronger, more inclusive community. We also plan to promote specific times of day for people to tend to their garden plot, so that there is more opportunity to interact with other neighbors. Our garden will also support our food bank, providing fresh, locally grown produce to those in need. This initiative reinforces the values of kindness and generosity, creating a culture of support and compassion. By helping to provide for our neighbors, we strengthen our community and promote a sense of shared responsibility. We’re also excited about the intergenerational bonds that will form with older adults sharing their gardening wisdom with younger generations, creating meaningful connections and a sense of continuity. This exchange of knowledge and experience will foster respect and empathy across age groups. Our garden is not just about growing plants, but about growing relationships and community spirit.
Kristin Wright: Killeen Creators
Killeen, Texas
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Killeen Creators focuses on growing compassion at all of our community gardens throughout our garden lessons and garden gatherings. We explain that everything we do in the garden, from our name to how we space the boxes, is planned to cultivate strong plants, strong people and strong communities, and we can only do that through thoughtful consideration of others needs and teamwork. We stress that we are ALL Creators. We create our environments and our futures with the seeds we plant. Those seeds need to be watered, fed and given time to grow, like children. We use these metaphors from the garden to show parallels for the youth engaged. We teach these concepts and parallels through both formal curriculum with handouts and exercises to elicit desired learning content, but we also focus on developing relationships and trust so we can customize the lessons for each youths particular challenges and opportunities. We include group lessons and challenges, to build understanding of compassion needed in teamwork to achieve a goal. We also utilize the community garden to develop inner compassion and pride in helping those with greater needs than oneself. We discuss taking ones share and we will have the youth assist with canvassing the neighborhood to identify elders and people with disabilities who cant get to the garden and take turns providing deliveries. In this way, we will first extend compassion to the youth, teach about importance of compassion in gardening and for humans, and then foster their experience of altruism.
Alex Smolak: Malama Sanctuary
Pahoa, Hawaii
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The garden will grow compassion by serving as a beacon of hope and resilience as it is located just blocks from the epicenter of 2018 lower Puna eruption. This eruption of the Kilauea volcano covered near 14 square miles with lava and destroyed over 700 homes. In a community so severely struck by the volcanic eruption, a community that was already underserved and living in poverty, a garden that demonstrates and provides food and additional income, is compassion. Furthermore, we will grow compassion toward health disparities by providing nutritious, tropical greens to families in need, and also teach people how to grow them. We will grow compassion toward economic injustice by providing workshops in the backyard growing of tropical greens and the tea leaf mamaki, which can provide rural families with extra income by growing these in their backyards. We will grow cultural compassion by preserving these culturally relevant plants. At our other location, we have a program that hosts field trips from local schools where children harvest the greens from the culturally important and relevant crop taro, and then the field trip continues to a local food bank and soup kitchen where the children take part in the delivery. This teaches children compassion for both those that are hungry and for the land. We will replicate this program, at this proposed site, which is an hour and a half drive from our other site and will serve a different population.
Dr. Matthew Suprunowicz: SustainEd Farms
Edgewater, Colorado
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The cohesive ideas and plans to repurpose the presently vacant lot have sparked excitement within the surrounding neighborhood and the school community. The Gals Who Garden initiative and community members have all expressed their anticipation to transform the current lot into a productive garden, environmental positive and basic beautification project. The shared purpose of creating a green space that will produce food and facilitate holistic wellbeing has already begun to bring people together who might not otherwise interact. In this the burgeoning pride in the supplemental education, empowerment and access to fresh food that the surrounding community will soon have is palpable. All of the produce that is grown within the garden will go directly to the students who attend Florence Crittenton High School, and to a food pantry that specifically serves Valverde, the neighborhood in which the lot is located. By creating access to everyone for free produce, we are able to decrease the judgment and stigma that can be associated with free or supplemented food. Through this, SustainEd Farms and Gals Who Garden hope the garden and produce will act as a community building agent where neighbors share recipes and commune both with each other and with nature.
Year 1 Grant Recipients
City Fields
Cleveland, Tennessee
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
College Hill is a neighborhood with strong community ties. In neighborhood meetings, people have voiced that they feel like this neighborhood is a family. Although there are some pockets of distress, most blocks feel like a safe space that kids can walk around. The community garden will provide a new place for the neighbors to interact with each other and share food, as the produce will be free for all residents to take. Since the neighborhood is a food desert, sharing the produce requires compassion for the fellow neighbor, as everyone is in need of easily accessible, healthy produce. Through learning about the importance of healthy food and food practices, people will grow to have compassion over the land they are working with as well, which in turn will create a stronger sense of community.
Food Exploration and Discovery
Monrovia, California
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
South Monrovia has long wanted access to green space and outdoor wellness activities. It does not have the same park access and community programs that exist just a couple miles north. South Monrovia residents have asked for equitable programs for a long, long time. This garden gives the residents in this area an amazing program and green space that everyone can visually enjoy and with our annual application program upwards of 27 households can use it each year like our program just a couple miles north. It helps grow compassion because not only can Southern Monrovians have a space they can walk to and enjoy, we can have our popular garden classes in this hub as well and host community volunteer days in the garden. Also our garden hubs have a public demonstration aspect in all of the spaces and this space would be no different. We can use the fence to grow items like passion fruit and vining fruit and vegetables that everyone can pick and enjoy.
Material Institute
New Orleans, Louisiana
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Growing compassion involves us acting upon the understanding that as living creatures we exist alongside and in connection with all other human and non-human beings, and also remain dependent upon the systems and networks, animate and inanimate, that sustain life across the planet. Gardens can deeply grow compassion if we are open to learning from the natural world. From gardens, we can learn profound lessons: patience, interdependence, care, and compassion. We will use the space to learn to imagine different relationships and boundaries with each other and the land. Octavia Butler said, “All that you touch you change / all that you change, changes you.” We are constantly impacting and changing our world – each other, ourselves, intimates, strangers. And we are working to transform a world that is, by its very nature, in a constant state of change. We aim to align ourselves with the most resilient and compassionate practices because we love the people in our community.
Natchitoches Parish 4-H
Natchitoches, Louisiana
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Our garden serves as a catalyst for compassion in our community. It nurtures empathy, kindness, and a sense of responsibility towards others. Through collaborative gardening, participants learn teamwork, cooperation, and support. The inclusive space fosters connections, builds relationships, and promotes unity. Intergenerational interactions promote understanding across age groups. The garden inspires acts of kindness and service. Sharing harvests with those in need and organizing programs for underserved populations cultivates compassion and community engagement. Educational initiatives emphasize environmental stewardship and sustainability, teaching interconnectedness and the impact of actions. Inclusive and supportive, the garden fosters empathy, promotes acts of kindness, and offers educational opportunities. It inspires individuals to embrace compassion, positively impacting our community.
Shamokin Community Gardens and Pocket Parks
Shamokin, Pennsylvania
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The Fifth Ward has a strong sense of pride but a bad reputation. Known for years as the “Bloody Fifth,” it has been passed over by the city for redevelopment. There are many children from low-income and racially diverse families residing in the Fifth Ward. There are no community gardens or even a playground located in the Fifth Ward. However, the area now has several community leaders dedicated to revitalization. One has started a community food pantry, depending on donations of food from residents and outside contributors. It is located outside her home and boasts a refrigerator/freezer. The pantry is open to anyone who has a need. Another family has instituted a Fifth Ward Block Party with free games and activities, while raffles are held benefiting non-profit community organizations. The community garden will reinforce to residents that they are not forgotten, and that change is possible. Working together toward a common goal will enhance the compassion that already exists.
Umoja Community Gardens
Troy, New York
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
As we have experienced with our first lot, creating a community garden and gathering space designed by and for the Black community has had a tremendous impact in the neighborhood. We hear from neighbors of our first garden regularly how much they appreciate the gardens presence on what was an abandoned lot. Growing compassion in our community first means investing in the well-being and joy of folks who expect to be neglected and pushed out. From there, we bring folks together to delight in the wonders of growing and sharing food together, which often leads to organic conversations about what challenges folks are facing and how we can better support one another. Umoja Community Garden has also always been a extremely intergenerational space in which our events often have participants ranging in age from babies and toddlers to elders. Bringing folks of different generations together inspires joy and strengthens our bonds as a community.
Workin Rootz
Detroit, Michigan
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
Once we transform the lot into something beautiful, the community respects the space! People no longer feel comfortable loitering, engaging in inappropriate activities or illegally dumping on or near the site. Community members feel safe, spend more time outside and get involved in caring for the newly transformed area, which helps them gain compassion for themselves that they then can extend to others. Studies show that people become more grounded and think more clearly after spending more time in nature. We have seen this firsthand after our community farm installation.
Brookelyn Elias Promise
Wyoming, Michigan
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
It is our goal to utilize outside agencies like a gardening club, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and other volunteers to work alongside our youth to help strengthen their support system. Our hope is that the youth we work with will become invested in a common goal, putting aside their differences and learning to work together. Our community garden will be a welcoming place for the teens we work with directly and for their families. The families are from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds; our highest percentage of youth are minority males. Youth will meet and get to know people they may not have had the opportunity or inclination to get to know. Their goal will be to cultivate, nurture, harvest–and share–the produce from our garden boxes. By working in the garden, they will have the chance to work side by side with members of their community.
Project GO
Pickens, South Carolina
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The garden will provide a unique opportunity for students to cultivate compassion within themselves, others, and their community. Our students struggle with trauma, past mistakes, and inevitable imperfections that we all carry. Many of them are harsh on themselves and struggle with finding purpose and joy in life. Lots of Compassion at Project GO would honestly start with our students: learning the beauty of imperfection, seeing hard work show results in front of their eyes, giving them a place to feel a sense of belonging, and providing healthy food to meet their basic needs. While they grow internally, they will also learn compassion is not all about self-referencing. They will also gain compassion for others through empathy, kindness, and listening when working in teams and problem solving. Gardens provide an awesome experience to be more present in the moment while expanding our knowledge and skills toward growing into a sustainable future citizen.
Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
How will your garden grow compassion in your community?
The Columbus Ronald McDonald House is fondly referred to as “the house with a heart.” Our families travel far from home to access care for their children and they gather together throughout the House in order to be there for one another. Lifelong friendships are made and support networks are built. While families are here for reasons outside of their control, our volunteers choose to be here and come to share their assistance with strangers at times when it is needed most. To us, gardens represent intention, dedication, and care. Our garden will be a place where these actions occur regularly. It will be a reflection of the love on which RMHC is built. Not only will the garden showcase the compassion that is already present here, but it will also be a place where acts of care occur. The RMHC garden will be a place for families and volunteers to come together and grow a community that is rooted in compassion.