MAWO - My World My Garden Fundraising

The My World My Garden project establishes micro-enterprise models for urban and community gardens under the brand My World In A Garden™. Food or the lack of food is an over riding issue in many of the rural and urban townships in South Africa. This is complicated by the extremely high incidence of HIV/Aids where good nutrition is a requirement for survival and the opportunity to be able to lead as “normal” of a quality life as possible.

My Arms Wide Open™ would like to create a large number of easily duplicatable sustainable organic micro-gardens that are growing and producing indigenous foods that meet the requirements for overall nutrition including protein, carbohydrates and fats. We will provide the education on successfully running a subsistence garden, how to turn that into a micro-garden business and from there even into a community garden enterprise. The programs will include working with children from an early age and through high school as well as young adults and adults. We will also provide training on processing and preparing raw foods to produce meals as well as food goods for resale.

The objective of the gardens is to support individuals, families or pseudo-families and the community. We will provide the resources and ongoing support to teach members of the community to grow enough to at first support their families. We?ll then teach them how to produce a small excess that will be ?sold? into another micro business program of community kitchens that support people in need like children, the elderly and others without means of feeding themselves, with daily meals as well as to provide meals for purchase to other members of the community. We will also work with the community kitchens to access schools and creches and provide them with either complete meals or the raw, fresh ingredients to produce meals for the children they care for.

Garden Design Considerations

Gardens should include: • Fruits
• Vegetables
• Trees
• Flowers
• Grasses
• Quiet Spaces
• Community involvement
• Water Sources
• Food delivery and scheduling
• Seasonal Fruits & Vegetables

Skills

We teach skills to: • tend the gardens effectively,
• increase output to soil sustainable levels,
• composting of vegetable waste back into the garden,
• harvesting, processing & storage
• food production for daily needs (recipes) and for sale
• fun foods for sale
• Community involvement
• excess production to sell into community kitchens
• Symbiotic relationships between foods both in and out of the garden
• Recycling and Composting

Foods

Foods include:
• Spinach
• Cabbage
• Maize
• Pumpkin
• Beets
• Tomatoes
• Sorgham
• Potatoes
• Carrots
• Onions
• Pineapples
• Apricots
• Peaches
• Brown beans
• Broccoli

Partners

• manzimvula™ Ventures, Inc.
• The Sustainability Institute
• Champions of the Environment Foundation
• Vital Edge Consulting
• Roy George - Gardens in a Bottle