That little Giving Garden - those little rows of raised beds tended by strangers - produces 70,000 pounds of fresh produce a year.
Since its founding, it has provided fresh, organic produce to over 200,000 families.
2/
Fresh produce is expensive.
Food-insecure families cannot afford the makings for a salad. They can’t afford a trip to the farmer’s market. They can’t afford local summer corn or fresh fruit.
When a food budget tightens to the point of choking, fresh produce is one of the cuts.
That little Giving Garden, tended by volunteers in their off hours and own time, fills a place in food baskets that would have otherwise have gone unfilled.
In that one sunrise hour, that one volunteer in her laceless shoes and ripped jeans planted probably fifty seedlings.
4/
And now others will help tend to them.
The aeedlings will grow to be high-yield plants.
The Giving Garden is a careful enterprise designed for its task: filling food pantry shelves.
Crop choices aren’t accidents.
5/
The Giving Garden is a loving farm tended by people who already have enough on behalf of people with too little.
May we all be volunteers in our own giving gardens.
May we all recognize the luxury of our surpluses and invest ourselves in lessening the shortages of others.
//
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My son played his last regular season game of soccer today; and I’ve had a pint or two of Guinness.
So it’s about to get very Hallmark movie in here very fast. You have been forewarned. If you strap in for the ride, ya gets what ya gets.
Anyway, let’s proceed.
1/
It wasn’t my son’s last game with this team. They have a tournament left in June.
Today was just the last match of the regular season.
Surely that couldn’t be enough to send a grown-ass man into a Guinness-fueled nostalgia thick as marmalade.
And yet here we are.
2/
I had that June tourney in my back pocket. That was my buffer. I wouldn’t need to get all emotional today, you see, because it wasn’t really my son’s last game of the year.
I fully believed that. I was good.
This wasn’t going to be the Day of Unbearable Sentimentality.
3/
Sitting at a bar (for only the 2nd time in a year) eating a quick lunch.
Meathead 1 comes in by himself. Meathead 2 eventually arrives.
They have now been talking about transgender kids in their circle of friends for 15 minutes.
And it has been... adorable.
1/
As soon as I heard ‘transgender’, I braced for some asinine slew of backwards, bigoted, dumbfuckery.
Instead, Meathead #2 led Meathead #1 through a catch up about a mutual friend’s child who is transgender and another friend’s child who is gender fluid.
2/
Meathead #2 knows what he’s talking about. These aren’t the awkward fumblings of someone who doesn’t have the language for a topic.
He is lowkeying it but he has thought about this. Processed it. Worked through it. Came out the other side where the job is to be an ally.
3/
Happy Mother’s Day to every mom who has ever made their kids a hot breakfast but not eaten their own until was cold.
Happy Mother’s Day to the moms who put their kids first.
1/
Biological or adoptive; parent or stepparent; a mother is the one who shows up - no matter what the birth certificate says.
If you are that kid’s shoulder, a parent they trust who comes through and cares, who hurts when they hurt and takes joy in their joy, you are a mom.
2/
A mom isn’t someone who just performs tasks; a mom is someone who loves from way down deep and who shows it.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms who don’t just perform the function but instead inhabit the role.
3/
Broad also established The Broad Academy which churned out a string of disastrous, incompetent public education administrators who wreaked havoc on large public school districts.
And while everyone is praising Broad, his Academy’s model was somewhere between ignorant and racist.
Broad’s attempts to hijack control of public ed. by churning out unqualified disciples was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for city after city.
Yeah, sorry, let’s not anoint a rich guy for being a patron of the arts while also doing harm to disadvantaged schools.
Oof, haven’t thought about this in years. Totally brought back the pitched, vitriolic battle in my town over his disciple’s “improvements.”
At one pt, thanks to Broad’s “teach to the test” obsession with standardized testing, my son had six straight periods of math and English.