August 28, 2017
Students are headed back to school, which means the hunt for school supplies has begun. On Friday, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center held an event for families in the South Dallas area to get free school supplies for their children. The event was first come, first served so the line was long from the start.
There were various activities for the children to participate in while their parents waited in line. One of these activities was the Freedom Farm. The Freedom Farm is a Get Healthy Dallas Project, in which the Hunt Institute partners with other non-profits to support the garden. The seedling farm is still in the process of getting set up, and once it is established, it will be a way for local families to start their own vegetable gardens.
During the back-to-school event, the Freedom Farm hosted a booth where kids could plant their own vegetable seeds to take home. Dr. Owen Lynch and his team were on site to ask kids questions and better understand existing community knowledge surrounding fresh vegetables within a food desert.
The fully-grown vegetables showed the children what their plants would one day look like. After planting their very own seeds, kids walked through the greenhouse where Tyrone, the gardener in charge, explained how a greenhouse works and how it would look once the seedling farms had been planted.
