In northwest Indianapolis, a group of kids participated in Mother Loves Garden’s summer camp, where they learned to grow their own food. The camp, started by Tysha Ahmad nearly a decade ago, aims to teach kids in the neighborhood how to cultivate their own produce.

Empowering the Next Generation

The camp ran from June 1 to July 3, and campers older than 12 will continue helping at the garden until November. Each summer camper gets paid $50 per week to attend, with the opportunity to earn more as they return in subsequent years. The kids learned how to plant food, turn poop into compost, and understand how bees communicate.

Ayla Noel, a 9-year-old camper, said she plans to save the money she earned, while J’Nae Walker, also 9, wants to use her earnings to buy food for her family. Feeding families is the primary goal of the camp, as the area is a food desert, making it hard for families to access and afford groceries.

Tysha Ahmad’s family has lived in the neighborhood since the 1930s, and she got her green thumb as a kid when her family moved to a farm in Georgia for four years. After working in insurance, Ahmad quit her day job in 2015 and started the growing space in 2017, obtaining nonprofit status for Mother Loves Garden in 2019.

Jasmine Martin, 19, who attended the camp as a kid, is now a counselor. She advises new campers to ‘bring some tennis shoes and be ready to get your hands dirty and have fun.’ The camp’s goal is to ‘pour into our youth as much as possible, so they can become our future leaders,’ Ahmad said.

Original reporting: Mirror Indy — read the source article.