Durham Collaborative announces Two Sustainable Community Garden Classrooms at WG Pearson Middle School and Holton Career Center

Durham, North Carolina – Thursday, August 26, 2010 – Natural Environmental Ecological Management (NEEM) and the Neighborhood PRIDE Alliance Preservation Committee are a public/private partnership replicating the Cuban Model of sustainable urban agriculture.
NEEM and the PRIDE Preservation committee announce two sustainable community garden classrooms at two schools in Northeast Central Durham.

100 Black men Triangle Chapter and GlaxoSmithKline in collaboration with the two school communities, NEEM and PRIDE Alliance Preservation Committee have placed beds for garden classrooms at WG Pearson Middle School and Holton Career Center. The collaborative worked with the schools, Principals, Teachers, parents, Department of Neighborhood Improvement Services, numerous other Durham City Departments and Keep Durham Beautiful. Together we built community with bottom up and top down support. These new school Community Garden classrooms will advocate the use of plant-based learning across the curriculum allowing teachers to incorporate the use of outdoor gardens, natural settings and plant activities in their classroom lessons. Our goal is to help make plant-based learning a part of every child’s education.

NEEM creates food security, addresses obesity and nutrition, educates our children on sustainable concepts and creates learning centers on unused school property. These school and community gardens are evolutionary and embody bringing the community together through dialectic engagement in a cooperative effort that is in the best interest of our children.

There is nothing more local than sustainable urban agriculture, and we congratulate the funders, Holton Career Center, WG Pearson Middle School and the kids. Planting days will be announced soon.

Learn more at their website, where “Every day is Earth Day.”