Volunteerism Efforts 

Recent wildfires raging throughout southern California indicate that climate change is a real occurring force within many coastal U.S. communities. ASCENDtials seeks to respond to these changes by supporting the community with essential tools that encourage building relationships, increasing knowledge on growing our own food, and providing preventative responses to the growing concerns over food insecurity. As a community, we require access to a community garden for residents to have as a backup. No one should be limited to supermarket produce, but have community resources to support your health needs. This means that we must work together to change our situation through collaboration with local populations and neighbors. 

ASCENDtials aims to fund the project through local grants and online donations. ASCENDtials will use student volunteers to fertilize the soil and plant vegetable crops within a small area of San Diego County’s Pantoja Park. 

Through this gardening initiative, ASCENDtials desires to educate and highlight these crops and gardening techniques to students (and San Diego’s residents), given America’s challenges with climate change, supply chain bottlenecks, and depleting freshwater sources and soil issues. By bringing together students of all ages, we can learn more about nature and ways to sustain and protect land in our own communities. This is necessary if we are to prepare ourselves for these issues that won’t go away without changing our awareness and responses to them. To sustain the garden, we will ask members to pay a small monthly membership fee of $5 to maintain the grounds and preserve the garden’s operational costs.