Frequently Asked Questions

Yes! Several of our sites have Family Food Farms, where families can meet regularly to work in their garden and cook together once a week. Families are also welcome to volunteer in the gardens together throughout the week. You can find more information here.

There are many ways you can get involved in our work — the best way is to volunteer! If you are interested in bringing Global Gardens to your school, please reach out here.

Global Gardens programs are comprehensive in scope. At each of our core elementary schools, we have a classroom and our teaching staff works with all students in grades preK-5 throughout the school year. At all core sites, we also offer out-of-school-time programs four days per week, ten months per year. At three of our core sites, we include year-round Family Food Farms, where students, their families and neighbors garden together and share a meal once per week. Our core programs serve Title 1 schools exclusively and are free for participants.

Through the Global Gardens Alliance, we offer smaller-scale versions of our core programs, as well as consultation, training and resources, to schools and other partners who want to use gardening for educational purposes. Our Alliance services are divided into Bud and Blossom tracks. In Bud programs, we provide consultation and support for classroom teachers who wish to use garden-based learning at their school. In Blossom programs, Global Gardens teachers directly provide during- or after-school education for specific classes or grades within a school. Alliance services are available to any school or organization in our community and are priced by the hour.

Our core programs are entirely funded by private donations from community members, which means that there is absolutely no cost to students or their schools.

Global Gardens Alliance member sites receive customized assistance and pay an annual fee that is priced by the hour. Some matching support is available for Alliance schools that serve low-income communities.

Peace education is a holistic discipline that seeks to help learners develop the values, knowledge, skills and attitudes to live peacefully in the world. Peace is viewed not as the absence of conflict but as a way of interacting with self and others that upholds the inherent dignity, rights, and capacity of all people. Peace education emphasizes dialogue, inquiry, critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, nonviolent behavior, and empowerment.

The philosophy of peace education underpins all aspects of the Global Gardens model. In our programs, we consciously shift the teacher-student power dynamic in order to bring students and garden educators together as partners in inquiry. We teach participants how to use a “peace table” to resolve conflicts through respectful communication. And we give them opportunities to create their own group culture with positive norms such as emotional expression, teamwork, appreciation for differences, and concern for others. Above all, we draw out students’ natural leadership and problem solving abilities and give them the tools to direct these toward creating positive changes in their lives and communities.

The first step in our programs is to engage students as active learners. We put students in the driver’s seat and encourage them to follow their curiosity, ask questions, and then learn how to find the answers. We’ve found that this is the most impactful approach to learning, with the highest chance for students to retain knowledge and apply it to their lives.

Global Gardens uses gardening as a vehicle for science and peace education, in order to engage students in learning and empower them to become agents of change in their lives and communities. We are proud to instill a love of gardening and cooking in our students, and to develop their skills in these areas. However, we consider the educational and emotional work we do with students – inquiry-based scientific and social problem solving – to be the deeper purpose of our program. For us, the garden is the perfect place to grow not only plants but also emotionally healthy and empowered students.

No, we’re local! Global Gardens was founded in 2007 at Eugene Field Elementary, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since then, we’ve expanded our core Global Gardens programs to five Tulsa schools, and we are working with additional schools and organizations through the Global Gardens Alliance. We currently work exclusively in Tulsa, but we aim to use the Alliance to reach partner schools and organizations throughout Oklahoma.