The Milagro Foundation, the nonprofit group founded by rock musician Carlos Santana, announced Tuesday with partner GrowingGreat that it will help install a new garden at an urban middle school in Marin County, California on January 18 as part of local Martin Luther King, Jr. Day festivities.
The new garden will be located at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Academy Middle School in Sausalito, and will help teach local students to appreciate fresh food, as well as provide opportunities for practical skill-building activities, according to the group. More than 60 volunteers from the North Bay Conservation Corps will help install the garden on Monday.
"Lack of access to fresh, affordable food is highly correlated with poor health," the Milagro Foundation noted in a statement.
This March, students will plant fruit and vegetables in the garden. GrowingGreat will then use the garden to run a cooking and nutrition curriculum-enrichment program. Students will also be given the opportunity to sell home-cooked items using produce from the garden at a local farmer’s market this spring.
The population of the section of Marin County where the middle school is located is 94 percent low-income, the foundation noted, and has a critical need for access to fresh produce and whole foods.
The nonprofit Milagro Foundation received $720,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan in February 2009 to fund nutrition programs for low-income children. Since then, the group has also supported programs in the Gulf Coast region, as well as on American Indian reservations.
Child hunger has become an issue of growing concern as unemployment rates remain high and poverty rates increase. In 2008, 21 percent of households with children reported that they were food insecure, which was nearly double the rate of the 11.3 percent of households without children, according to the nonprofit Feeding America.
