Pleasantville
Community Garden
Our How-To Guide:
Creating an Organization to Donate Fresh Produce to People In Need.
Who Are We?
We are the Board Members of Pleasantville Community Garden (PCG), a local volunteer organization in Pleasantville, New York that grows and gathers fresh produce to donate to area food pantries. From our birth in 2014, we have expanded to growing in three gardens and collecting leftover produce from our local farmers market. As of October 2020, after just six years of growing and gathering, the Pleasantville Community Garden has donated nearly 90,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables to those in need.
What Is This?
This How-To Guide is a compilation of experience & best practices from the founders, organizers and Board of the Pleasantville Community Garden and the combined knowledge of numerous community experts. This information includes documents, photos, and links that will help garden organizations and well-established gardens alike. This Guide is geared toward community-run donation gardens, as this was the experience of the Pleasantville Community Garden. Some of the information may be more applicable to your garden project needs than others, so we suggest that you jump around to different pages or sections to find what is most useful. You may also download the pdf to your desktop for easy reference or for printing and sharing.
Why?
The goal of this How-To Guide is to expand the mission of the Pleasantville Community Garden, to help others battle food insecurity by providing people in need with healthy fresh produce. We want to help passionate people in other towns, cities and organizations to create their own community-run donation gardens, strengthening their community and supporting those in need. We also support the proliferation of gardens in general! Whether you are making a donation garden, a teaching garden, a home garden, or plan to sell garden plots in a Community Garden, we hope this Guide will provide materials that support your project. Please reach out to the contact information below with additional questions or comments.