Community Engagement
Sharing our bounty
Our goal is to be responsible and contributing members of our community. We recognize the complex interrelatedness of people and the environment. At Paideia, we all are tasked with living up to our Framework of Values. Through this program, we hope students will embody the value of environmental stewardship by advocating for the preservation and protection of the natural world while acting with the dignity of all of our neighbors in mind.
With this guiding light, we work with an ever-growing, ever-changing group of partners beyond those with whom we share our produce. Read more about where our food goes here.
Our growing partners
In 2019, a partnership of three educational farms in Atlanta addressing food insecurity came together to share resources and strengthen our local food system. The three partners, Paideia Farm, Price Middle School Farm, & Metro Transitional Center's Farmlet, were known for a few years as Grassroots Growers Alliance. What started as functionally a farm incubation project has grown into a collaborative partnership of cost-sharing, knowledge-pooling, and idea and tool swapping between our three institutions. Paideia Farm shares greenhouse space, walk-in cooler space, tools, labor, and more as a part of this collaboration.
Metro Transitional Center’s Garden Program provides fresh food access on-site and for the community, support for participants who are transitioning to life outside prison, and fosters meaningful community connections through what they grow. Participants manage the food garden and, along with Paideia high school students, attend monthly workshops focused on organic gardening, horticultural therapy, and health & wellness.
Read more: The Prison Garden Empowering Women to Pursue Growth, Modern Farmer, May 2022
Purpose Built Schools of Atlanta (PBSA) runs Price Middle School Farm. Learn more about their farm program here.
Community Seed Sowing & Greenhouse Management
In Spring 2022, Pi Farm donated more than 800 seedlings to at least 16 different community gardens and urban ag sites around the Atlanta Metro Area.
In Fall 2022, we worked with four growers at Campbellton Community Garden and Browns Mill Food Forest, projects of Aglanta to grow a diverse array of edibles and ornamentals to be planted for public consumption.
Plants as Medicine
Our Medical Botany garden along with our perennial pollinator beds are growing large amounts of plants that can be made by (student and certified) herbalists into medicine.
Some of these plants are used by our high school Medical Botany class, and some are donated to the community.
We have traditionally participated in Herbalista's "Grow-A-Row" program, which has morphed into donating directly to Fleur + Forage, formerly known as the Herbalista Free Clinic.
Mutual Farm Aid
Some farms and organizations we work with (in addition to those previously mentioned) include Decimal Place Farm, Snapfinger Farm, Aluma Farm, Carhan Family Farm, Row by Rowe Farm, Grateful Pastures Farm, Atlanta Harvest, Riverview Farm, Historic Westside Gardens, Concrete Jungle, Food Well Alliance, Global Growers, Bake-n-Jam, and Honey Next Door.
We partner with a number of other urban and not-so-urban farms in the Metro Atlanta region in an effort to help each other survive and thrive. This doesn't just mean donating produce! It can look like a lot of different things, including but not limited to:
student community service hours
buying goods for our sliding-scale CSA
sharing seedlings when a farm experiences early-season crop failure
sharing knowledge (Erin used to own and operate her own for-profit farm and is a wizard in the greenhouse)
sharing farm infrastructure like greenhouse space, cooler space, and farm tools
Land Stewardship
Together with our hosts at Atlanta Mennonite Church and our neighbors at the Language Garden Preschool (with whom we share the space), we are trying to leave this plot of land better than we found it.
How do we do that? It's complicated, we couldn't possibly cover it all here, and we are always learning! Crop rotation, integrated pest management, composting, and very few chemical inputs are part of it. We take soil health really seriously. We hand-pull a lot of weeds in our crop fields. We are slowly but surely working to remove introduced invasive species from uncultivated portions of our land.
We work toward a style of agriculture that some call regenerative and are a Certified Naturally Grown farm. Basically we want good soil health, a healthy and vibrant ecosystem, and to farm in a way that acknowledges and combats climate change so that future generations can enjoy this space as much as we do.