Cincinnati residents looking to enhance the greenness of their green thumbs will soon have a new - and well-funded - resource. The
Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati, an Avondale-based nonprofit organization that provides horticultural education to individuals, students and community groups, is receiving substantial support for The Green Learning Station, its environmentally oriented education program.
While the Civic Garden Center has offered gardening courses to the community and supported more than 47 active gardens in the city, the
Green Learning Station takes its educational programming in a new direction. The Station's courses, seminars and actual construction will provide both training and research opportunities for those interested in sustainability through horticulture.
The Ohio EPA likes the idea; it recently awarded the Civic Garden Center a $50,000 general grant to fund field trips - including supplies and bus fees - for 60 middle school and high school classes.
"It has been our hope to be able to provide this hands-on, real world field trip and curriculum free of charge, and to provide funds for students to actually make a change at their schools," says Ryan Mooney-Bullock, program manager for the Green Learning Station.
She explained that while the Station's courses on gardening, green roofs and rainwater harvesting have significant value for gardeners, the hope is that they could sprout a grassroots solution to one of Greater Cincinnati's larger environmental problems: uncontrolled rainwater runoff that overflows sewers and dumps pollution into the region's waterways.
"We have all this water running off. If we can plant more gardens and bioswales, we're not only creating beautiful spaces, we're solving the rainwater problem," she says.
This falls hand-in-hand with the goals of the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati's
Project Groundwork, a multi-year series of projects aimed at modernizing the area's runoff management system. In fact, the MSD is funding a series of sustainable control projects at the Green Learning Station. The efficacy of the projects will be measured, with the data made available to students and researchers investigating these green solutions to runoff problems.
Environmental quality organizations are not the only funders of this major educational initiative. The
Greater Cincinnati Foundation is providing $50,000 to fund digital signage at the station, making its educational displays and information more accessible to the community.
"We funded the Green Learning Station not only because it is an innovative and collaborative project but it also gets the broader community involved in addressing the issue of storm water runoff," says LaToya Moore, associate program officer at the Greater Cincinnati Foundation.
The Green Learning Station's facility is under construction at the Civic Garden Center on Reading Road, with funding support from PNC Bank, Social Venture Partners and a growing list of local and regional foundations. If the support continues, Civic Garden Center officials say they hope to open the Green Learning Station, and begin spreading the knowledge that could support grassroots sustainability in Cincinnati, in April 2011.
Writer: Matt Cunningham
Photography by Scott Beseler.
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.