Our Foundation is supporting Trellis For Tomorrow’s new "Season of Solidarity" campaign.

Trellis creates transformative real-life opportunities for youth and their communities by teaching self-development and entrepreneurship skills while promoting personal growth. The purpose is to engage youth in building resilient communities in underserved areas by their creating, developing, and harvesting sustainable organic gardens. There are four youth-led gardens. The youth are compensated for their labor.

Additional organic vegetable community gardens are cultivated by corporate sponsors and donors.

Since 2009, Trellis has educated over 4,500 youth, and distributed 60,000 pounds of organic nutrient-dense produce to food insecure community members in surrounding Philadelphia suburban communities.

This spring, with Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, the Trellis administrators named the youth gardens Victory Gardens (Victory over Virus). They shared blogs, gardening tips, and encouraged partners, supporters, and volunteers to plant their own small personal family gardens - encouraging them to submit family photos of their sprouting seedlings, and the progress of their plantings - so this was a special virtual "happening" for communities.

“Season of Solidarity” took on an additional meaning with Trellis’s commitment to broaden their diversity and inclusivity goals. All administrators and instructors engaged in Implicit (unconscious) Bias training. Many of these principles were incorporated in (virtual) lessons with the participating youth of the program.

So during this season of Thanks, we are grateful for the ambition of Trellis For Tomorrow in producing a truly bountiful harvest, in more ways than one.

Visit the Trellis for Tomorrow website.