CALIFORNIA NATIVE GARDEN FOUNDATION
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Mission Statement
California Native Garden Foundation is a non-profit educational, research, and resource organization that promotes gardening with California native plants. Our mission is to demonstrate the beauty, garden worthiness, and ecological appropriateness of California native gardens and to advance knowledge about native plants and increase their availability.
About This Cause
The best way to describe our organization is by presenting a timeline illustrating how our mission and goals have evolved over the past dozen years. When CNGF began in 2006, our mission and purpose was to inform and educate the public, particularly youth, about gardening with native plants. In our early years, we awarded garden grants to help more than 85 schools establish teaching gardens. In 2008, we established our college internship program and has trained over 100 interns from California colleges, including Stanford University, Santa Clara University, San Jose State University and UC Santa Cruz. College interns conduct scientific and social research while overseeing garden operations. We expanded our educational services in 2008 to include Summer Nature Camp and Earth Hero’s Nature Badge Program for children ages 6 to 12 years old to learn and develop skills catered towards sustainable land management and ecological land use. Through these programs, we strive to provide a comprehensive and interactive education dedicated to inspiring an environmentally conscious youth within our community. At CNGF, we recognized that many schools do not comprehensively teach students about climate change and its current and future impacts on the environment and humans around the world. Because it is largely absent from the elementary school curriculum, most children do not have any formal academic reasoning to put the vast amount of information and opinions into context, and they have no credible outlet to ask their own questions. Rather than relying on fear, we hope that these programs will enable and empower children to realize how they can reduce the threats of global warming by up to 86%. They can learn tangible skills in science, technology, engineering, etc. that will assist with mitigation tactics and adaptation plans, as well as be able to use this STEM in their classes. We believe teaching about climate change should not be about preaching. We hope that children will ask their own questions about the world around them and provide them with tools to go out and find answers. In 2009, we created a garden laboratory model (ELSEE: The Environmental Laboratory for Sustainability and Ecological Education) to bring outdoor eco-literacy education to more children. It’s a learning lab where local ecology and sustainable food systems meet. We teach children and their families to grow abundant food, while protecting and valuing nature. The ELSEE model embodies 200 benchmarks of sustainable urban land use and is the only certified site in Santa Clara County recognized by The United States Green Building Council and the Sustainable Sites Initiative. ELSEE is the model for a garden that serves as a laboratory for hands-on learning of science, nutrition, stewardship and sustainability, and promotes healthy land use by preserving native biodiversity, growing local sustainable food, and protecting ecosystem services. Because the impact of climate change/extreme weather events is creating a global food crisis, CNGF’s work has reached beyond the schoolyard. In 2013, we created a regenerative farm model that grows abundant food using fewer resources. It sequesters more carbon, builds soil organic content and produces 7-10 times more food than conventional tilling models. We started a regenerative farm program in Ghana that is now, with multiple international partners, a teaching and training model for Ghana’s youth. In 2017, CNGF wrote a bio mimic visioning statement, detailing the components of an urban ecovillage. Mimicking the life cycle of a plant which grows in one place, we theorized that most human needs can be met close to where we live by eliminating infrastructure and using micro solutions to manage energy, pollution, water and waste while growing food nearby using regenerative farming methods. Taken together, people living in our ecovillage model can reduce their carbon footprint by 86%. That same year, we designed The Kalana ecovillage model, a regenerative farm model that is a teaching and training center for youth. It will prepare them for future sustainable urban land use professions, including, for example, regenerative organic farmers, bioengineers, human health and well-being program directors/managers, aquaponics engineers, local ecologists and agro-ecologists, soil scientists, onsite waste management engineers and horticultural therapists. Happening in real time and parallel with our effort to gather support for this kind of land use in cities is our “Build 25” initiative. It started in 2016 when we served as the sustainable land use consultant for the first ever 1,000 resident mixed income ecovillage/urban farm in America to be built in Silicon Valley, which is called The Agrihood. This community-based movement's goal is to build 25 Regenerative Organic Agriculture (ROA) training and research farms in Santa Clara County. We believe our region can lead the nation in transitioning to regenerative organic agriculture, while at the same time training our youth and conducting research comparing ROA to existing farming methods. Globally, Santa Clara County recognizes the urgent need to transition from an unsustainable chemically dependent farming model to an ecologically driven one that utilizes natural processes to sustain human populations while protecting ecosystems services. In simple terms, this ROA system allows nature to do the heavy lifting and delivers abundant, healthy food while restoring nature. Our goal is to gather support from: • academic institutions, universities and colleges; • public and private schools; • local and regional government; • developers; • land owners; • funding institutions and grantors; • technical advisors, scientists/researchers; • urban and peri-urban farmers, Big Ag farmers; • corporations; • health institutions; • churches, synagogues and mosques; and • the media.