The Pittsburgh Foundation
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Small and Mighty: Lettuce Turnip the Beet Community and School Garden Association

Building, cultivating, and sustaining school gardens while providing fresh produce for kids and those who love them.

The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Small and Mighty program awarded $15,000 to Lettuce Turnip the Beet Community and School Garden Association in 2020 and 2021. The organization builds, cultivates and sustains a beautiful life through sustainability education programming and access to fresh local food. It offers sustainability education programming for children from birth up to grade 12. These out-of-school support programs are sequential, active, focused and offer explicit skill-building activities that emphasize character development and social skills.

This grant will support its Our Helping Meals (OHM) program, which provides no-contact delivery of prepared meals, dry goods, gardening supplies, personal care items, and local produce and dairy to single-family households and economically disadvantaged, immunosuppressed and elderly individuals. OHM incorporates free wellness workshops for all participants as well as school staff, economically disadvantaged college students and young adults. The organization will continue food access programming and will collaborate with Native Nosh Co-Op and Kitchen to further increase access to fresh local food regionally.

The Small and Mighty grants program, an outcome of the Foundation’s focus on poverty and inequality, has, as of Dec. 2020, awarded $1.6 million to nonprofit organizations with budgets of less than $600,000.