New York City Habitat Humanity organized a successful volunteer day at The Garden Of Resilience. Garden of Resilience is a Greenthumb community garden stewarded by DIVAS for Social Justice and Laurelton Operation Clean Up Ben Randazzo, Construction Coordinator strategized with garden members for months to include Garden Of Resilience in their Beloved Community Initiative. The Beloved Community Initiative is a reiteration of their Brush With Kindness (BWK) program. For more than 10 years, volunteers have painted, planted, fixed up, and beautified spaces all across the five boroughs! While the majority of our work has been in NYCHA community centers, we also work in senior centers, churches, playgrounds, schools, residential buildings and more. BWK took on these projects because it allows us to reach families and communities that our traditional construction model could never reach, and in turn, helps us to make an even greater impact on our city. The Beloved Community Initiative e is a funded program that encourages community members in communities of color to volunteer on Habitat beautification projects. New York City Habitat for Humanity’s – Community Preservation Program through its Brush with Kindness projects, provides painting, landscaping, and repair services through multi-day volunteer projects in all five boroughs at community and faith spaces, as well as existing affordable residential buildings. This work saves tenants and community partners thousands of dollars, and brightens the spaces, breathing new life into existing housing and community spaces.
NYC Habitat partnered with our volunteers and fulfilled the following for the community garden:
Hanging landscape materials
Recreating galley wall of student artwork
A major garden clean up consisting of 15 bags
Prepping the land for spring bulbs
NYC Habitat’s hard labor was celebrated with students from the North Eastern Seventh Day Adventist Campus planting daffodil bulbs in four different areas of the garden for the spring. Garden Of Resilience received bulbs from the New Yorkers for Parks, Daffodil Project. Garden Of Resilience is a great example of a community asset in Southeast Queens that is stewarded with love from the support of community stakeholders like NYC Habitat.
