World Relief was recently awarded the the King County Green Globe Award.
Since 2016, King Conservation District has been partnering with World Relief to create a community garden on an acre of parking lot donated by Hillside Church at 930 East James in Kent. The garden will be open for public use and easily accessible by over 1,000 immigrants and refugees settled in the area by World Relief. Having a place to grow fresh, healthy, culturally relevant food is the goal of the Hillside Paradise Parking Plots Community Garden.
After creating a small demonstration project of 5 planted stock tanks, Hillside Community Garden has leveraged KCD’s Seed Money Grant into over $125,000 in additional grants, hundreds of volunteer hours from community supporters (including T-Mobile, Turner Construction and the 30/30 Project) and resource donations (from Cedar Grove Compost, McLendon’s Hardware and Home Depot). In just over one year’s time, Hillside moved from concept to a viable community garden with 44 garden plots seeded with cover crop and awaiting gardeners for Spring 2018 planting.
World Relief Seattle was named a Leader in Community Resiliency. Below is the excerpt from the award website.
“World Relief Seattle designed and built a unique refugee and immigrant community garden for growing culturally appropriate crops from an unused church parking lot in Kent. Hillside Paradise Parking Plots features 44 in-ground garden beds and six ADA-accessible plots that is cared for by people representing 20 different countries. The project removed 29,000 square feet of asphalt, restored permeable ground for rainfall retention, and created a rainwater catchment system that not only provides garden irrigation but infiltrates and cleans more than a million gallons of stormwater annually.”
Just before receiving the Green Globe award on April 18th, World Relief with support from Tilth Alliance used 42 King Conservation District provided grow bags to teach container gardening classes which included pre-literate students, family literacy with kids (12 kids, 8 moms) and level 3-4 English.
Anna Beebe, AmeriCorps Individual Placement, Community Engagement