Nurture

About this project

Nurture is a youth-led businesses that focuses on building and expanding community gardens in the Waterloo Region. Nurture’s goal is to foster positive mental health among youth by making Waterloo Region a sustainable food forest. Nurture was built out of the GreenHouse Initiative. GreenHouse is a social impact incubator under the University of Waterloo that offers programs, opportunities, and a community for students to develop problem solving skills, form innovative ideas, and make new forms of sustainable impact around social or environmental change. Smart Waterloo Region Innovation Lab invested in NURTURE after they won People's Choice in Winter 2022. We have been working with them on the Food Forest Pilot.

Problem statement

Have a Child & Youth run network of community gardens.

Impact

The Waterloo Region is resilient to food insecurity, through youth-led gardening and food production.

Key takeaways

Nurture has been an amazing pilot project! We have received great feedback from Children and youth throughout the Region of Waterloo.

Learnings

We learned a lot from Nurture! Especially how to grow food within the Region of Waterloo and ways to make it fun for children and youth.

If we could time-travel and start this project again...

• We would start planning for the summer gardens during the winter
• Find more ways to engage children and youth
• Scale up and build more gardens from the start

Thanks To...

Thank you Sriranjini and Jackie at Nurture! You are an amazing team. A special thanks goes to Jahmeeks for being so hands on with this project. We are also thankful for Grayson as he was so helpful with the more business side of things and to Ashleigh-Ann who supported the project. We would also like to thank Elizabeth for creating the branding and logo. We appreciate all of your hard work!

Now What?

Nurture was involved in numerous gardens in the summer of 2022, we are looking to have more garden spaces in the coming year! If you have a space for a community garden or are interested in being apart of one please contact us :) 

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