The Garden Club’s green house is located near Evans’ bus loop and baseball field.
Evans High School has received a $2,000 grant for its Garden Club thanks to the efforts of students from the School of Social Work at the University of Central Florida.
Four Bachelor of Social Work students in Instructor Coleen Cicale’s fall semester course Macro-Level Roles and Interventions in Social Work wrote a proposal for the grant as part of a class project focused on supporting the Garden Club and raising awareness of food insecurity.
Their goal was to obtain funds to support, sustain and expand the high school’s garden in hopes of supplying fresh foods to the high school and possibly the community, said Cicale.
The B.S.W. students — Jessica Treland, Christian Torres, Chelsea Kalin and Juliette Woronov — collaborated with Evans High School teacher Delila Smalley to develop the grant proposal. They submitted the proposal to Whole Kids Foundation, a charitable organization based in Austin, Texas, whose mission is to provide children with access to healthy choices through partnerships with schools, educators and organizations.
Smalley learned this spring that the students had written a winning proposal.
“We’re very excited,” Smalley said. “We’re working to make our organization sustainable, so the first thing we’re doing is mapping out a plan for how to distribute the funds over time.” Among the club’s first purchases will be garden tools, soil containers, wood for additional planting beds and seeds, she said.
Cicale’s entire class (pictured below) worked to support the Garden Club by holding a community event to raise funds and secure donations of fruit and vegetable plants and seeds. The students brought in $329 and received gifts of 274 packets of seeds from local nurseries.
“The class did an excellent job,” she said.
The University of Central Florida, College of Health and Public Affairs, is a core partner of Evans Community School.
