Your Garden: Children’s Therapy Garden

Jess and I have many years experience between us working with children with specific needs. We know that not all children fit the expect mould of the “normal” classroom and we are passionate about changing this.

We are currently in the process of establishing Your Garden: The Children's Therapy Garden at our site based at The Historic Village Tauranga, working with primary school children with specific needs. These needs can include ASD, ADHD, PTSD and children with high anxiety to name just a few. The target students we are aiming to use the programme with will generally not be receiving any funding for learning assistance at school therefore resulting in them not achieving in the classroom or even being ready to learn in the structured environment and basically flying under the radar. By taking the children to a new learning environment such as Your Garden and allowing them to lead their own learning with the use of garden therapy, including sensory discovery and development of executive functioning (the ability for them to be ready to learn) they can then take these skills and use them back into the classroom.

As part of this programme we are also giving back into the community. A considerable amount of the produce harvested will go back into the community as we are donating this produce to Good Neighbour (a local Community Group) to distribute where needed. This is a very important part of our programme as it is teaching the children about success, empathy, being an active member of the community and the good feeling of knowing your hard work is going to people who need it more than themselves.

Our project will have minimum day to day running costs however, we require funds for the initial startup and development of the site. All donations will go towards all

garden beds, a large shed, garden equipment and plants. Any funds remaining will be used to continue to buy seasonal plants for the children to grow and harvest.

We are currently working a pilot programme on a much smaller scale at a community garden site and we will continue this programme while we set up the permanent site. We are already receiving positive feedback from students and schools and we have seen the changes the programme can make already. This is a programme to help children, the schools and the community.

Please take a look at our Facebook Page to see what we have done so far:

https://www.facebook.com/yourgardentauranga/