Organization: Denver Urban Gardens
Mission: DUG establishes and supports community gardens, provides education, expands food access.
Activities: DUG supports 188 community gardens with 17,500 gardeners while impacting over 40,000 individuals across 6 counties in Metro Denver. Our program ensures that the gardens are well built and responsive to their specific environment, whether located at schools, parks, neighborhoods, senior communities or low-income housing. We maintain the physical structure as well as the human infrastructure ensuring well-functioning communities through training, fiscal sponsorship and being the interface between gardeners and land owners. In 2019, we built 3 new gardens: Jefferson Green Community Garden, Slater Elementary Community Garden and Denver Language School at Gilpin Garden.
DUG offers garden, health and ecology related workshops and school curriculum including the Healthy Seedlings program and youth farm stands. In 2019, 130 educators, serving 100+ schools in six districts attended our Helping Kids Gets Healthy Workshops. In turn, they taught the DUG curriculum to over 3,900 students. DUG's Community Education Programs use a 'Train-the-Trainer' model to spread horticultural skills. We trained 23 Master Community Gardeners who went on to educate 3,500+ people, and 29 Master Composters educated 3,700+ people.
DUG's Grow a Garden program provided 1,500 primarily low-income participants with 16,000 seed packets, 11,800 seedlings and garden know-how to grow good food. DUG's network of gardeners provided approximately 60,000 lbs of excess produce to the local community through partnerships with hunger relief organizations and Fresh Food Connect. With Project Worthmore, DUG also supports immigrant and farmer training at DeLaney Community Farm.
NTEE category: Food, Agriculture & Nutrition
Secondary category: Community Improvement & Capacity Building