A Visit to Promise of Peace Gardens
January 7, 2020
For years the Seed Project Foundation has given out grants to farmers in the North Texas area to help grow and support local farmers, but the stories of the impact of these grants onto its recipients has never been told. My name is Lily McCutcheon and I am a senior at Lovejoy High School and I am passionate about giving small voices with big ideas a greater platform to reach out and tell people there stories. For my senior capstone project, I have partnered up with the Seed Project Foundation in hopes to tell the story of how the SPF is impacting the community around us.
My first garden I went out to visit is the Promise of Peace Garden, located just steps away from the up-in-coming food mecca of Trinity Groves in West Dallas. The garden is a densely packed ecosystem with vegetables of all colors cared for by the local community. Elizabeth Dry, a former educator in the Dallas area, began Promise of Peace in 2009 in hopes to find a solution to the dissolution within public schools for kids who feel they have no sense of place, purpose or community. The garden serves as a safe haven for kids to come together to work aside one another, while also helping to solve the problems of food security in the community.
In the Spring of 2019, Promise of Peace received a grant from The Seed Project Foundation that was used to help kickstart their Soup It Forward program. Soup It Forward supplies soup kits that include recipes, fresh vegetables, and an empty mason jar so you can cook a meal and then share your soup with a neighbor. The idea behind the soup kits is to educate families about nutrition through making different cultural creations each month, wethers it’s a Kale Soup or a Egyptian Red Lentil Soup, the kits are able to expand the families culinary knowledge through making different types of culturally influenced dishes. The Soup it Forward program reminds families to come together to cook and eat together as Dry states that kids are “50% more likely to be successful in school if they eat with their family at least once a week”. Soup It Forward also focuses on giving back to your neighborhood by sharing your soup of the month to a neighbor or someone in need. Dry believes you are able to cultivate a community of giving and acceptance when neighbors come together to enjoy a meal. Because of the grant received from The Seed Project Foundation, Promise of Peace garden was able to create more soup kits to be sold and help purchase supplies to be used in the garden. Dry hopes the soup kits are able to encourage sharing and connectedness among families and neighbors.
The Promise of Peace garden is maintained by volunteers all over North Texas, specifically kids from after school programs within the Trinity Groves area. The kids are able to come out to learn how to grow seasonal fruits and vegetables, gain knowledge of different culinary techniques, create art piece “plein air” and so much more. Dry believes the rewarding process of growing your own food teaches kids life skills that help support their success in the future. The Promise of Peace garden also works with different local organizations including SMU Mustang Heroes, who come out once a month to help out in the garden, Uplift Heights Primary School, a charter school in West Dallas, and local chefs who feature seasonal ingredients grown in the garden. Through collaboration with neighboring organizations, Dry has been able to create a community of connectedness centered around the Promise of Peace garden. Going forward the garden hopes to purchase a market stand at which to sell produce grown in the garden and Soup it Forward kits to help spread the ideas of sustainability, education, and community.
