Garden Raised Bounty

At the beginning of the year our program approached members of the community offering our services as first year design students for their projects. One of the groups who approached us was the Garden Raised Bounty (or GRuB) farm located on Elliott Avenue in Olympia, Washington. 


GRuB is a grass roots non profit organization dedicated to nourishing a strong community by empowering people and growing good food. GRuB hosts a Cultivating Youth Education Program which focuses on connecting children with the health, self esteem and positive life changes that come with growing and eating good food. The program is centered around elementary and middle school aged children and offers a unique hands on learning experience that teaches not only about growing food but also about growing and working as a team.


GRuB also has a Cultivating Youth Employment & Drop-Out Prevention Program which engages 30+ low income teens each year in land and community based projects. Their curriculum centers on GRuB's core themes of farming self, farming land and farming community. The farming self portion focuses on one on one relationships with the GRuB staff regarding goals in academics and post high school life as well as workshops in public speaking, non violent communication, conflict de-escalation and healthy relationships. The farming land focuses on the production of almost 11,000 pounds of food that is either donated to the local food bank and to the crew members and their families. The farming community is based around in community service either with building free gardens for low income families or hosting workshops to show new gardeners the skills they have learned while with GRuB.


GRuB's Kitchen Garden Project works with Thurston and Mason County low income families building raised garden beds and mentoring on the care and use of the beds. More than 2,000 beds have been installed since 1993!


Overall the members of the GRuB farm have an extremely huge heart and do whatever they can no only for their crew members but also their community. The members of the design team are ecstatic to help them with this design build project and to help out such a deserving organization. 


If  you would like to know more about GRuB visit their website at: http://www.goodgrub.org/