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This Fraser Canyon community has declined in prosperity and a school built for hundreds now has only 60. Many come to school hungry and few have enough vegetables in their diet because vegetables can be twice the price as in the city.
Principal Debra Devine has a big goal: Growing an abundance of vegetables -- enough for everyone in the school and for the community’s food bank in dire need of fresh produce.
To meet that goal, the school needs $8,200 to finish restoring a greenhouse and to build raised beds on the school grounds. But it also needs $8,000 for food for kids' lunches until there's enough food being grown to fill that need.
“They need fresh vegetables, but we have to put protein in there as well. Feeding them is our ultimate goal," says Devine.
The greenhouse renewal project began in the spring of 2014. Devine applied for a grant from Adopt-a-School to start work on the greenhouse on the school property, which was in shambles.
Holes in the roof, its irrigation system a mass of broken bits and pieces, its wiring and lighting disconnected and hanging loose or coiled in a mess in a corner, the whole place stuffed with rubbish, broken desks, garbage in plastic bags, bottles, cans — a sad relic of what the school had once been when the town was thriving.
After a story about Boston Bar's school was published in The Vancouver Sun, volunteers drove from Vancouver and Chilliwack, horticulturists offered help, and work teams came from the community.
Michael Moll, one of the founders of My Green Space, a Vancouver company which developed an app to help people grow food in small spaces, came up.
He and an UBC agricultural student gave a one-day seminar to students on the techniques of growing vegetables based on a square foot of soil which, he says, will grow 16 carrots, or nine beets, or less than five kale.
Moll donated software and an app that prompts when tasks need to be done during the growing cycle to ensure the maximum harvest.
But the initial $12,000 grant wasn't enough. Instead of just fixing the holes in the roof, the old fibreglass panels needed replacing. This was done when school finished using a California-based system which makes the greenhouse look like it’s covered in bubble-wrap.
“This will take 10 feet of snow,” said Devine of the new membrane. “The owner of the company — Solar Wrap — flew up to help at his own expense once he knew what we were doing.”
The irrigation system is being restored, the heating system is working and the wood for the growing tables has arrived. But the electrical and lighting remain to be done. The wood to make the growing tables has arrived.
Please help get this project finished, so these kids can get growing.
OUR 2015 CAMPAIGN IS CLOSED. PLEASE SEE OUR MAIN PAGE (https://fundrazr.com/profiles/vancouver-sun-childrens-fund) FOR OUR CURRENT CAMPAIGN.
THE 2011 SCHOOL YEAR had barely begun at Admiral Seymour elementary when teacher Carrie Gelson, frustrated after a difficult day at work, wrote an impassioned open letter to Vancouver residents questioning whether anyone cared about her inner-city students who were coming to school with empty tummies and holes in their shoes.
On the day The Vancouver Sun published her letter, when she arrived at the East Vancouver school, “People had already dropped off thousands of dollars in cash by that time.”
So we told her story, introducing readers to her children. And because you began donating money, clothing, school equipment and field trips, by the spring of 2013, the donations were close to $1 million to Adopt-a-School. The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund matched some of those donations for a total of $1.3 million.
Because of you, hundreds of Vancouver-area schoolchildren now have boots to wear in the rain, warm breakfasts and are experiencing things they would never have otherwise.
For more than three decades, you have enabled The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund to raise than $11.5 million, of which more than $7 million has been distributed to nearly 1,000 non-profit children’s charities in B.C.
The season of giving is once again upon us, and we're hoping you'll contribute to Adopt-a-School to keep alive this great legacy that we both started so many years ago.
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