Community Service Ideas for the School Garden

Giving back to our community through gardening is a great way to introduce the concepts of volunteering and advocacy to students and young children.

Why build community through school gardens?

Developing a rich sense of community at any school can be incredibly challenging. With busy parents, overburdened teachers, and so many commitments and demands pulling at our time, it is hard to make space for your school community as well. But the garden can offer a unique place to begin the process without feeling like it's a forced effort. As a shared space and a community-run project by design, the school garden provides a foundational backdrop for establishing traditions, ideas, and shared goals by its very nature. You simply can't have a healthy garden without teamwork and collaboration. These very same concepts also serve as the backbone for a healthy community and, by extension, a desire to serve that community.

Many adults are quick to dismiss the abilities and contributions of children in TK-6, but I've continually found them to be incredibly thoughtful, creative, and able to have massive impacts.

Another reason to incorporate service through the garden is that the kids really want to help! If your students regularly attend classes in the garden, you have a built-in team that's already capable of using tools, working together, and producing results. Many adults are quick to dismiss the abilities and contributions of children in TK-6, but I've continually found them to be incredibly thoughtful, creative, and able to have massive impacts. Turning our garden lessons into active, real-life community service is some of the most meaningful work we've done at our school.

Our project tasks sign up board so students could initial next to the job they wanted to do that day

Getting started at a school garden- Who you need to talk to

First things first, if you're going to be working outside of the garden you'll need to get your school on board with your plan. I know that it can be challenging to navigate the different relationships at a school site, so start simple: get your principal's sign-off. At minimum, this will give you permission to do the work. But ideally, you'll want more than just a green light from one person. See if you can join forces with other organizations at your school to either help you organize or get the word out to the rest of the school. Some of them may even have projects in mind that would benefit from garden's help. Many of them also have resources or connections that you could leverage to take your project further.

I also highly suggest talking with teachers to see if they want to tie in the service projects into what they are covering in class. At our garden, we line up our community service week with Martin Luther King Jr. day and turned that whole week's lessons into service projects. We can directly tie his incredible legacy of serving others to our work in our own school community and then teachers can carry this discussion further in their classrooms.

Dates that line up well with community service projects in the United States:

Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 16th

Fred Korematsu Day, January 30th

Cesar Chavez Day, March 31st

Earth Day, April 22nd

Arbor Day, April 28th

Lastly, make time to talk with the lead custodian and the grounds crew leader at your school. What we don't want to do is create more work for them, or overstep. And, they always have great insight about the school grounds that could inform your service projects and make them that much more impactful. In the end, if you plant something or make a new trash sorting plan, these are the people who will carry the project beyond your day of service, so getting their input is absolutely key in making sure your project doesn't fizzle out after your work is over.

Make time to talk with the lead custodian and the grounds crew leader at your school. What we don't want to do is create more work for them, or overstep. And, they always have great insights about the school grounds that could inform your service projects and make them that much more impactful.

Students weeding a bike path near school and planting flower seeds

Project Ideas for your Community Service:

These are to help generate ideas for what could work at your own school:

• Clear pathways from weeds or overgrown shrubs

• Rake leaves onto tarps and move them to the garden to mulch

• Sweep up paths

• Remove trash with litter pickers

• Weed neglected spaces and sew native wildflower seeds

• Make new waste sorting signage for the cafeteria

Waste sorting signage the students made for the cafeteria

• Set up a new composting bed

• Plant a native pollinator garden

• Host a plant giveaway

At the end of our MLK Jr. Service week we handed out free plants- broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuces

• Plant flower bulbs in prominent spots around campus

• Write positive messages on the sidewalks around the school

• Create posters with positive messages to hang in the hallways

• Harvest flowers to create lunch room table bouquets or give them to teachers/staff

• Set up a rain barrel to collect rainwater

• Set up a worm composter and feed it food scraps after lunch

• Look for areas around campus that could use flowers, and plant water-wise low maintenance options (can these be donated by local hardware stores or plant nurseries?)

• Trim back overgrown hedges, shrubs, and grasses

• Paint bike racks or benches

• Plant an herb garden near the cafeteria

• Donate a garden harvest to the school community or the cafeteria

• Create mini garden art to help spread joy

• Clean out leaves and dead undergrowth from established landscape plants

• Paint rocks with messages of support and hide them around campus for people to find

• Research local native butterflies and plant their preferred plants on campus to help support the species (plant milkweed to support monarch butterflies, for example)

• Plant a rain garden in an area of campus that is frequently flooded

Hopefully you've gotten some great ideas from reading through this list. Let us know if you put a plan into action, we'd love to see it!