New! Education Grant for Town Green Community Garden Volunteers
The Windsor Garden Club Board of Directors has announced a new Education Grant for outstanding volunteer work performed at the Town Green Community Garden by plot renters and volunteers.
The Town Green Community Garden (TGCG) in Windsor is the Windsor Garden Club's biggest community service project. The club manages the community garden on land owned by the Town of Windsor (California). WGC has a contract with the Town to manage and "grow" the community garden.
The club leases plots within the garden to Windsor Town Residents. Community Gardeners pay an annual rental fee based on garden bed size. The fee covers costs of operating the garden, including water (provided to all garden beds through a drip irrigation system, along with additional water available through garden hoses.)
Since 2015, WGC has required that all TGCG garden bed renters complete at least six hours of volunteer maintenance work PER YEAR to take care of the common areas in the community garden by weeding the ADA-accessible walkways, other garden paths, trimming growth around walkways, cleaning birdbaths, raking, and other "spruce up" garden chores.
Many of Windsor's community gardeners are families with young children (some of them Spanish-speaking), or retirees living nearby in townhouses or apartments with small yards (or no yards) and no place to garden. Others are just people who love gardening and want to meet other gardeners and grow things in drip-irrigated raised garden beds -- without using chemical pesticides.
Every year, many garden bed renters go "above and beyond" the call of garden maintenance duty and donate a large amount of landscaping hours to keep the TGCG looking beautiful and functioning well.
Some of them are also attending classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, or Sonoma State University, and working their way towards school.
As a non-profit community betterment organization - a 501(c)3 -- the Windsor Garden Club is committed to building a better community in the Town of Windsor. The club already offers an annual SRJC scholarship for local youth studying biology, agriculture, environmental science, horticulture, and viticulture there.
In 2014, the WGC Board identified an educational need: to assist the education of TGCG volunteers or their family members studying at SSU or SRJC in non-garden related majors -- math, business, English, to name a few.
After discussing the matter among WGC Board members and Town Green Community Garden steering committee members, the club announced a new Community Gardener's Education Grant in August, 2016.
The grant of up to $500 per semester may be used at SRJC or SSU for tuition, books, parking passes or other educational needs. WGC will reimburse awardees for up to that amount after they submit appropriate SRJC or SSU receipts.
The club will happily accept donations to fund either its Windsor Garden Club Scholarship Fund within the SRJC Endowment, or the new Windsor Garden Club Community Gardener Education Grant. All donations are tax deductible. Interested donors can mail checks to the club at:
Windsor Garden Club PO Box 892
Windsor, CA 95492
