Partnering with schools may not be easy...

...but it can produce a great payoff, as illustrated in this story from the School Me! blog from the Los Angeles Times. In "Asphalt is easy, green takes guts," they detail the challenges that local advocates faced in creating a garden for an inner-city school. The payoff:

Then [Emily] Green leads us all to a swath of land alongside the freeway. Sirens wail. Exhaust wafts. But with big piles of dirt looming where there was once only cracked asphalt, we have no trouble imagining the urban Eden the district is already sculpting into the land: More than an acre of green, including a three-quarter-acre garden with shaded areas for families to join their children after school and a “woodland” the school’s students said they craved.

Canary Island pines will muffle the freeway. A native plant garden is also in the works, paid for in part by the $25,000 first prize the project received last month from the Garden Club of America.

Finally, the conspirators are now confident that the district will help them build a new teaching kitchen, where Silverton and others will supervise children as they turn what they’ve grown into meals. The hope is that their garden school will be a model for any campus that wants to become more pleasant.

A very inspiring story.