Penn State Health Growing Gardens, Relationships in Lebanon
A new community garden will offer food and connection
By Andrew Staub
Communications Manager
On a sun-splashed May afternoon, a garden came to life in an unexpected place: a small concrete plaza in downtown Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
About a dozen volunteers gathered in the city for a planting event led by Penn State Health Children’s Hospital. Clad in matching blue T-shirts and donning gardening gloves, they needed only an hour to fill prepared beds with herbs, vegetables and pollinators. Penn State Health hopes the space will bloom into a bountiful garden, as well as a welcoming and safe space for the community around it.
“I personally really enjoy gardening so I’m very happy to be able to share my passion and to create such a great space for the Lebanon city,” said Evelyn Marin, one of the volunteers from Penn State Health.
Rite Aid Healthy Futures supported the new community garden through its Connecting Communities signature initiative, a $3 million grant program launched this year. The goal of Connecting Communities is to help major institutions like children’s hospitals collaborate with the neighborhoods around them in new and deeper ways, and ultimately connect people and places with the resources needed to advance health and racial equity.
Based in Central Pennsylvania, Penn State Health received a $500,000 Connecting Communities grant to fund a variety of food-related initiatives. That included the community garden that sprang to life in Lebanon, a city of about 25,000 roughly half an hour east of Harrisburg.
Dave Funk looks on as Penn State Health’s Evelyn Marin prepares a sensory garden for planting. Filled with fragrant plants like lavender, salvia and thyme, the sensory garden is designed to pull in passers-by from the street.
Cultivating Networks
The garden will not only connect people with the soil and the vegetables that come from it, but also link one of the region’s major health providers with a community center, a local school district and an impactful nonprofit institution serving the city.
Run by Laurie and Dave Funk, the Chestnut Street Community Center donated the courtyard space for the garden. Housed in a building formerly occupied by the now-shuttered First Evangelical Congregation Church, the community center partners with Lebanon County Christian Ministries by supplying overnight sleeping spaces for individuals and families in need of a safe space.
The community center’s central location – near the bus stop, banks and the post office – makes it an ideal location for emergency shelter guests to spend the night before waking up to go to work or the nearby LCCM resource center.
As a bonus, the Funks’ son will help care for the plants, ensuring the project’s sustainability.
The community garden is also directly across from Warren G. Harding Elementary School, part of the Lebanon School District. As part of its community food initiatives, Penn State Health plans to expand health education in the Lebanon School District to include teaching students gardening techniques and how to grow their own healthy foods.
Laurie Crawford, a project manager with Penn State REACH, led the volunteer planting event.
“We’re excited to have students here and have the community come, pick from the garden, taste fresh fruits and vegetables,” Crawford said. “As I’ve learned over the years, when we give kids and people food picked right from the garden, that connection really opens their eyes to it, makes them try new things. And we’re hoping it’ll just put more fruits and vegetables into their diets.”
A volunteer with Penn State Health plants tomatoes in a sunny spot of the garden. Food from the garden will support a community shelter and local food pantry.
Using the Entire Growing Season
Food grown in the community garden will support those using the shelter, as well as the Lebanon County Food Bank. It will be another resource in combating rising food insecurity amid the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and as inflation causes grocery bills to burst. Lebanon County’s food insecurity rate has ballooned to 13.1 percent, up 4 percentage points since 2017 according to Feeding America, a national nonprofit fighting hunger.
After gathering with Crawford to get their gardening assignments, Marin joined other volunteers planting sensory gardens in two cedar boxes strategically found closest to the sidewalk. Filled with lavender, thyme, sun drops and other fragrant plants, the sensory gardens are designed to invite passers-by into the community space.
Meanwhile, other volunteers dug small holes for several varieties of tomato plants on the sunniest side of the garden, found spaces for pollinators in shadier spots and began spraying down the plants with water from a hose.
Bright, leafy greens already sprouted from a spring and fall section of the garden that features peas, radishes, three types of lettuces, kale and Swiss chard. A nearby herb garden will help Penn State Health show how home cooks can add flavor to food without reaching for salt first. The garden also includes several varieties of peppers to spice up dishes.
“We really wanted to take it through the whole growing season,” Crawford said.
Volunteers mingle after planting a community garden in Lebanon. They hope it will become a community gathering space for Lebanon residents.
Creating a Community Space
While volunteers removed old hedge rows to prepare for the planting day, they left a lofty magnolia tree to create a comfortable shady space.
A bench under the tree has already become a popular spot for shelter guests to rest or for people looking for a moment of peace, said Laurie Funk. She lives next to the community garden and was one of the volunteers for the planting event.
“We also come home at times, and we find people sitting on the bench, either they’re waiting for their children to come out of school, or occasionally teenagers who are just hanging out trying to find a safe place to talk,” Laurie Funk said. “The fabulous thing about it is we’re very visible to the street. … The school is here and it’s just got the whole neighborhood kind of feel of being a safe place.”