Community Gardner Plans Neighborhood Farm

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Germaine Jenkins is a certified master gardener in North Charleston, an area of Charleston, South Carolina that is low income and lacks access to a full-service grocery store. She’s got a big vision for a new way to bring healthy, fresh food into her neighborhood. 

Jenkins wants to establish a nonprofit urban farm, Fresh Future Farm, on 0.75 acres of the grounds of a former elementary school. It would be more than just a place to grow and buy fruits and vegetables: It would be an entire community food operation, with an on-site store to sell produce, toiletries and other groceries. School groups and residents could come to tour the facilities or take classes on farming, cooking and the food industry, and underemployed people in the area could be trained on the skills they’d need to work on the farm or start their own.

The North Charleston Finance Committee approved the use of the elementary school for the project in June 2014, a month after Germaine won the South Carolina Community Loan Fund’s Feeding Innovation Challenge and the $25,000 in seed money that came with it.

She hopes to have the project off the ground by winter 2014.

Read about Fresh Future Farm in the news.

Catch up with Fresh Future Farm on Facebook.