Program: Growing Resilient Children; The Garden as a Non-Judgmental Teacher

Description: Gardens are more than places to grow food and flowers; they are outdoor classrooms, places of hope, connection, and inspiration, places where children learn compassion, communication, and essential early life skills. A garden’s very nature encourages children to slow down, listen deeply, and simply ‘touch the earth.’
Join staff from Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) to learn more about our Therapeutic Garden and Youth Education Programs. Participants will receive tried-and-true tips for teaching in the garden and activities that encourage personal and interpersonal growth and success.

Learning Objective: Introduce participants to ways to use gardens and gardening as a way to foster and support social and emotional learning.

Growing Resilient Children Presenters:

Lara Wirtz Fahnestock (she/her), DUG’s Director of Therapeutic Gardens, has a passion for building community, teaching children where their food comes from and finding places of beauty and healing wherever she can. Lara joined Denver Urban Gardens as a Garden Leader in 2010 and DUG staff in 2015. In her nine years at DUG, she has worked with Garden Leaders and garden projects and now oversees DUG’s Therapeutic Garden Initiative. She has a BA in Biology from the Colorado College, a certificate of Authentic Leadership from Naropa University, is a Licensed Massage Therapist specializing in trauma healing and is a Horticulture Therapy Practitioner.

Judy Elliott (she/her) is the Community Education Cultivator at Denver Urban Gardens, where she brings her lifetime of experience into DUG’s three pillars of food, climate, and community. With a background in horticulture and social justice, she has worked with immigrants & refugees (both adults and children), who have experienced the extreme traumas inherent in refugee camps and taught nutrition/gardening education curricula in inner-city schools. Her experience in teaching populations in third-world countries who have been exposed to pesticides and degraded soils led her to develop and implement a comprehensive community composting program and passionately believes that healthy soils and their connection to healthy food and healthy people are an inherent right for all. She deeply believes that gardens are for all, that cultivating a sense of wonder and joy through connecting to the earth is both restorative and healing for body, mind, and spirit.

Rob Payo (he/his) is a Senior Education Designer for the UCAR Center for Science Education, providing K-12 educators, students, and the general public with information and teaching materials in weather and climate education. As the former Director of Youth Education for DUG, Rob supported early childhood teachers with strategies for building young students’ identity as science learners through the use of gardens as outdoor classrooms.

Sponsored by:

Part of the GroMoreGood Garden Grants Initiative