After four weeks of hard work every Saturday, an accessible garden is blooming in the backyard of the Campbell Center’s group home for adults with intellectual disabilities, just in time to celebrate the project’s completion on Earth Day.
Glendale Kiwanis member Trevor Marca was looking for a service project for new club members to help them bond together and meet new people in the community. After reviewing 10 proposals from local nonprofits, Marca and his team chose to support the Campbell Center by building three raised garden beds for residents there who love to garden. The choice paid off with the Kiwanians building something lasting that they could take pride in.
Club members donated recycled wood boards, and the club raised funds to purchase pavers, irrigation equipment, bags of soil, vegetables and flowers. Rene Karapedian donated wood for the raised beds and Angelique McNiff donated the plants. The project’s funding came from the Glendale Kiwanis Club and its members, who all pitched in.
“This has been such a heartwarming project,” said Nancy Niebrugge, the Campbell Center executive director. “Each week I could see the volunteers and our residents getting to know one another and enjoying the whole experience together. Our residents are already talking about making fresh salads and salsa!”
After several weekends of cleaning, weeding, leveling the ground, laying pavers, installing a drip watering system and building the beds, more than 20 of the center’s residents and Kiwanis volunteers planted the vegetables and flowers as a final step on April 23, Earth Day. The crew then celebrated with a potluck lunch in true community fashion.
The Campbell Center was founded in 1954 as a nonprofit organization by Phyllis and Jerry Campbell, parents of a daughter with Down syndrome whom no school within the Glendale school system would accept because of her disability. Over the next 69 years, the Campbell Center has evolved into an agency whose mission is to partner with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, empowering them to successfully gain independence and attain their desired outcomes through opportunity and choice. For more information about the Campbell Center, visit TheCampbell.org.
First published in the April 29 print issue of the Glendale News-Press.
