Banneker Elementary School, located at Gregory and Askew on Kansas City’s East Side, is a Title 1 school with many children who come from financially challenged homes with traumatic histories. In 2013, Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in the Brookside neighborhood was already supporting the school through a program of packaging supplemental food for Banneker families.

Dorothy Curry, a parishioner at St. Andrew’s, had the idea of asking the school if they were interested in starting a vegetable garden on the school grounds. The mission statement for the garden project was: “…through first-hand experiences, to nourish students’ curiosity, to cultivate environmental stewardship, and to increase knowledge of organic food production and nutrition in collaboration with faculty.” The Banneker faculty loved the idea, and the Banneker Schoolyard Garden was born.

A force of nature, Dorothy leads a team of volunteers who maintain the garden and guide children through the process of harvesting and preparing food from the garden, in cooperation with the school’s teachers and principal.

Now in her late eighties, Dorothy is at Banneker virtually every week, handling many of the physical maintenance tasks along with her team, who come from St. Andrews as well as from the larger community. The Garden Team works with students (currently kindergarten and first grade) on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, focusing on gardening from late March through October, and providing classes on cooking and culinary arts from November through March. The team attends to the garden’s maintenance tasks after the classes and on weekends.

For the students, the Banneker Schoolyard Garden builds familiarity with, and appreciation for, teamwork through growing, harvesting, preparing and tasting the fruits and vegetables in the garden, including discovering some fruits and vegetables that are new to them.

For the volunteers, there is the reward of seeing the delight in the children’s eyes as they make discoveries and share in the mastery of new tasks with their peers. This mutually beneficial arrangement is a powerful demonstration of what happens when, together, we unleash our power of philanthropy.