In 2017, Earstin Whitten and his wife, Dee, took note of a neglected community garden on the hospital campus of Saint Mary’s Health Network in Reno, Nevada. They approached the hospital administrators and began restoring the health of the land shortly thereafter. Thus, Soulful Seeds was born. By 2018, Earstin and Dee had recruited a board of directors, developed a produce-distribution network to serve two of the highest-need census tracts (defined geographic regions used in census-taking) in the county, and built a network of community volunteers to help maintain the garden. Quickly, the two learned of a large plot of land the county wanted to use to support the residents of the Our Place Campus, a facility that provides transitional housing to unhoused women, their children, and pet companions. It took two years to work through the layers of government before Soulful Seeds could secure a sublease to manage the land, but it was successful, and the grassroots project has been developing ever since.
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