“I think when I came through that door, and I looked out here, the first thing I saw was concrete all around,” Alan Smith, 74, of Newport Beach, California, told The Epoch Times while pointing at the doorway to the Garden of Hope fruit and vegetable garden that produces food for the Catholic Charities’ food pantry ministry.
“I just prayed at the door, and I thought, ‘Lord, you said I can do this,’ and he showed me the vision.”
Smith, a former CEO and furniture designer, used his experience in contracting to help execute the project—which began a year and a half ago, during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re composting all that stuff that we used to dump in the dumpster, so we’ve made pretty good strides for the environment in the city of Santa Ana,” Smith said. “Even the dirt that we take out of our garden goes to the City of Santa Ana, to their community garden.”
Through generous financial and equipment donations, the metal troughs, which were originally made for animal feed, are now used to not only feed the community, but also to teach them the process of gardening and farming.
“We want to be able to educate people in the neighborhood how to do this in their own front yards,” Ellen Roy, the charity’s executive director, told The Epoch Times. “The plan is to expand what we are doing here and really get the community on board with our long-term vision as an education center that not only teaches how to grow food, but also how to prepare it.”
“That’s our next fundraising effort: to get the kitchen in so we can start on our food demonstrations and really get our education program going,” Roy said.
“I haven’t run across anybody who’s focusing on how to teach those people to improve their lives by taking care of themselves, rather than just having to rely on, you know, a food bank. And I think [that] is the biggest difference that we have to offer as part of our mission, because problems are not solved until you teach people how to get out of their situation.”
Roy noted that this concept is the heart of the mission of Catholic Charities—to teach and assist people to move up from the struggles they’re facing.
“This garden is really the first start of what we’re trying to do and to get it going,” Roy said. “The amount of food that we can generate here is relatively small compared to what is given away in total upfront, but if you tie this into the whole education aspect, you can’t replace that as people learn to grow and cook their own food.”
In front of the charity’s building, orange traffic cones were formed into a single lane to help direct cars toward the organization’s food distribution area, where families can receive a box of food to help relieve the costs of California’s inflation crisis and the rising cost of food.
The mid-week ministry and its volunteers and staff often encounter more than 700 cars daily. On Tuesday through Thursday, the food donations will now include fruits and vegetables grown in the garden.
According to volunteer and sponsor Jean Steen, growing one certain type of fruit in the garden has proven to be the best.
“Tomatoes are prolific,“ she said. ”You plant one plant, and you will get 100 tomatoes or more, and that’s more food for the community that we serve!”
Steen, who assisted Smith in the design process, has been volunteering at the garden since its beginning. Her love for gardening also went into the project as it slowly came to fruition.
“I just felt really strongly that this is a Catholic Charities facility and that it needs to have a cross, so the initial idea was to take the planters and put them [into that] shape,” she said.
To save space, Smith came up with the idea to construct a vertical hanging garden in the shape of a cross with more than a dozen plants set near the wall of the entry area of the garden.
“Now, it looks like how you would normally see the cross, and it goes with the idea that it reminds us of God’s blessing on our local garden,” Steen said. “It’s amazing, and we look forward to the impact this could potentially make on the community.”
