The Tower Garden Comes to Galilee Ministries of East Charlotte

"The harvest is food.
The harvest is people.
The harvest is community building and strengthening.
The harvest is what Galilee is known for…feeding people and growing food."

- Joanne Stevenson Jenkins, Galilee Ministries of East Charlotte, Co-Chair Board of Directors

From its inception, Galilee Ministries of East Charlotte has been dedicated to serving their local neighbors, providing a welcoming place of learning, service and fellowship and serving as a meeting place for refugees, immigrants and other residents of the city. Galilee Ministries hosts a variety of nonprofits, providing vital services to the community, including English classes, citizenship classes, life skills classes, after-school programs, a food pantry, gleaned fresh vegetables and a culinary certificate program.

This spring, they are adding the Galilee Tower Garden to their offerings, bringing together people from various races, ethnicities, cultures, faiths, socio-economic backgrounds and ages for bridge building with the community. The planned activity for the Tower Garden is to bring people together to seed, water, attend and harvest fruits and vegetables grown in hydroponic gardens (a.k.a. tower gardens). Tower gardens are used to grow a variety of fresh, nutritious fruits, vegetable and herbs using light and water and without soil. Tower gardens will complement the Galilee Community Garden, an edible garden, grown outdoors in the soil.

Why garden without soil? Many in urban and local communities are from areas that are food deserts with little to no access to fresh or affordable produce. Galilee’s Tower Garden is an opportunity to close this gap by teaching people to plant, grow and harvest their own food. The vision is that as a community, all will share together, learn together as they grow together, share stories together, harvest together, eat together, share recipes together and relate to each other. There will even be opportunities to sell produce at farmers’ markets and to learn about financial literacy and sustainability.

The Tower Garden project will have its public launch at the Galilee Center later this spring. Galilee will partner with Ramona Big Eagle, an environmental engineer and cultural educator, of the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina. Big Eagle will host nutritional sessions at Galilee Center and teach the refugee, migrant, immigrant community and neighbors in East Charlotte to plant, grow and reap the produce from the tower gardens.

“At the Galilee Center we provide a sacred place of welcome and belonging,” said Faith Hamilton, interim executive director. “The Tower Garden provides an ecologically centered welcome experience with our partners and new friendships so that we can care for our earth together as one. What we gain from this project will be, in every way, a sacred harvest. We thank the Universal Institute for Successful Aging of the Carolinas and Ramona Moore Big Eagle for selecting the Galilee Center to be a home for the tower gardens.”

Galilee’s hope for the Tower Garden is that it will educate and encourage new ways of growing food and learning about healthy nutrition that “benefit the earth and its inhabitants” and embody our call to love God and our neighbors.

For more information on the Tower Garden or to learn more about public offerings, visit the Galilee Ministries of East Charlotte website, call (704) 900-5210 or email [email protected]