Our Ministry

The garden is a place where we meet people and grow relationships. The garden also provides participants with a basic purpose “to tend the garden” Gen 2:15. For those who are either seeking support through community or trying to provide food for their families the garden is a basic tool God has provided to meet our basic needs. Our community is praying for God’s direction and strength.  As a community Grow Together strives to gain ground in the lives of the people who participate in our community. The first step is involvement and we look forward to serving with you and seeing God use your gifts to bring heaven here on earth. Romans 15:13

Many people have been inspired by Grow Together in 2012 and it even generated a film that was played at the Attic Film Fest and spawned numerous television and radio coverage of some of our events. You can view our movie trailer at grow-together.org. Grow Together has grown from serving one garden community to gardens serving four communities, refugees, elderly, foster care children, and food pantry clients within one year. Below is a description of our mission, vision, objectives, and goals for 2013. To meet our goals and objectives we are needing support financially and support through serving. This will be possible through the supportive momentum generated from people like you.

Our mission is to reach out to neighborhoods and communities in need. The garden is where we grow relationships and volunteers who then branch off to meet the various needs in the neighborhood. We are able to find out about needs by being in the community and getting to know the people we serve.

Our vision is to serve neighborhoods in need in a way that that empowers residents to wean themselves off our assistance so that they can create a supportive and sustainable community. We want these neighborhoods to not only meet their own needs but to be positive contributors in the cities in which they live.

Our goal at the refugee garden is for the refugee’s to take ownership of our current services at Capitol Village.  We will have participants take ownership of these initiatives through training and education.  Currently we serve through gardening, Bible study, prayer, ESL(English Second Language) and leadership classes, music, and an art mural in universal symbols to help with communication. We want the Refugee garden to be an example of a community showing our other garden communities how to meet neighborhood needs.

The objective for Grow Together in 2013 is to insure we have the resources in place to meet our current gardening community’s needs. We want a supportive team for each community that has one volunteer per five participants. We want to grow into three other communities in need in 2013.  We want to create a way for these neighborhoods to make an income to help provide for their basic needs.

Our Grow Together 2012 events and initiatives will propel and support our 2013 initiatives.  Our efforts have identified leaders that can take on projects like our gardens. Leo, our project guy, has been able to meet garden resources challenges. We identified ESL as a need at the refugee community and we set up ESL classes five days a week.  Lack of financial support was also identified as a need in our communities and we kicked off our business plan with an International Cook off and many participants used vegetables from the garden. We also hired a refugee to take over the refugee garden. Grow Together has been mentored by parent organization River City Hope Street. Phase two of our business plan is to develop ways to sell products produces by people in our community either by a Global Bizarre or through other business avenues. We will set up presentation to consult churches and organizations in Austin on how they can get involved in their own Grow Together outreach through our experience and support or inform them how they can help support our current outreach communities!