Building Up Community Green Spaces with City Blossoms DC

Our members understand how spaces can shape experiences and transform lives. That is why CRC CARES partnered with City Blossoms DC to improve their Girard Street Park community green space.

Though eager neighborhood children complete most of the garden’s upkeep, some jobs predictably go undone (weeding)! So on June 23, 17 members of CRC CARES volunteered to weed the vegetable garden, cut vines in flower beds, and paint new bilingual signs. As our team worked, school children played in the surrounding park, and some even joined us in painting stakes for the herb garden.

The Girard Children's Community Garden in Columbia Heights is filled with different fruits and vegetables, from garlic cloves and grapes to two apple trees named Romeo and Juliet. The back of the garden is dedicated to a variety of herbs, while beautiful flowers line the gates to attract bees to pollinate. City Blossoms DC sells the harvest in a community market, reinvesting the proceeds into the garden to create more nature-based opportunities for the children who help it succeed.

City Blossoms is a non-profit dedicated to providing spaces like the community garden in Girard Street Park for children to work and play. Serving in neighborhoods in which children may not otherwise have access to green space, City Blossoms provides bilingual, free, and affordable after-school, in-school, and summer programming to predominately Latino and African-American youth from toddlers to teens. Though based in Washington, DC, City Blossoms has worked on over 50 sites nationwide.