The Willie Mays Boys & Girls Club is located in the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. This Boys & Girls Club is named after Willie Howard Mays Jr., a former MLB player for the San Francisco Giants. The garden at this location provides food for its community members, which is comprised of the students and staff members on site. If there is a particularly large harvest, the food is also shared with other Boys & Girls clubs in the area. While this garden has been established for several years, it has recently experienced revitalization through permanent maintenance by Community Grows.
On September 6, 2019 at one pm, the CommunityGrows team worked together at Willie Mays Boys & Girls Club to change and improve the onsite garden. They flipped the garden beds, planted new plants, as well as put in new irrigation for the community. At the start, we divided different teams to work on separate teams to flip beds, plant new plants and clean up around old plants therefore there is more room for the new and better plants. As the new kids are coming in for the new school year, we also would like to teach culture, roles, and methods to the youth at the Boys & Girls Club therefore they could invest and work together to better the community.
We hope to use some of the food harvested in cooking classes on site, to solidify student understanding of how food is grown, and encourage healthy ways of eating.