Implementing A Community Garden In Las Vegas Essay Example

Thank you for agreeing to meet with me today. I hope that by the end of my speech you will agree to sponsor our community garden. Las Vegas is a big city, and it is only getting bigger. But with the growing population, there will be an influx of people who will need a community to help them adjust to a new city. The community garden gives people a space to come together and provide fresh, healthy produce. A community garden would be beneficial to the environment, and to the health and wellbeing of the community members.

The biggest benefit of a community garden is having free accessible food to everyone who needs it. Many people in Nevada are food insecure, and according to the COO of Three Square, twenty percent of Southern Nevada residents don't know where their next meal is going to be coming from. Gaining access to high quality and nutritious food would also help solve health and food problems for those in need. It gives them sustainable vegetables and fruit so that they don't have to be stuck with greasy, fattening foods. In addition, the garden allows people to save money on food in low income neighborhoods. The food in grocery stores is slowly rising in price in the past couple of years, and growing your own food lets you save some of that money.

Community gardens also benefit the neighborhood as a whole by bringing everyone together. It gives people a sense of belonging, where they can meet and connect with people they might not otherwise have even talked to without the garden there to bring them together. It provides the community a place to hang out, and gardening is proven to be therapeutic and relaxing. A garden can also reduce the amount of crime in the community, and allows people to feel safer. When there are vacant lands in the area, there is a rise of crime and drug use, and a decrease of property values because of that rise. Filling that area with a garden will solve some of those problems. Mainly, it would raise the value of the area, and rid the area of criminals who would use it for personal gain.

We are going to be building this community garden for a number of reasons, but the main two are that we need a safe space for people in the community, and to bring down the crime rate in the area. With the creation of this garden, it will give all ages of people in the community, a place to be with others safely, and socialize amongst each other. It provides children and young adults an area to do something after school or on the weekend, without getting into trouble. Gardening will help keep the community happy and healthy, and with something to do. The garden will also help bring down the crime rate in the neighborhood, which would cause more people to move in. In a study done in Philadelphia in the early 2010s, researchers found that having a community garden lowered the overall crime rate by 13 percent, and people reported that they felt 58 percent safer going outside. (PNAS, National Academy of Sciences) 

Implementing a garden would greatly improve the community and it's residents, and I think that having your business would greatly help with our initiative. With your investment into the garden, we would establish a partnership that would involve helping start the garden from the ground up with the essentials needed to maintain a garden. We need things like irrigation, the starting foundations of landscaping, and people to help start the process of building the garden. You could also use this opportunity to start a mentoring program with the people in the community. Having people come out once a month, to give gardening classes to people that want to take them. They can learn valuable new skills like hard work, patience, and the value of working with your hands. 

Once again, thank you for meeting with me today, and I can't wait to hear from you in the future about your investment in our garden. I hope that you have taken what I have said today into serious consideration, our project could really use your help. With your assistance, we could turn this vacant lot into something beautiful and meaningful in the community.