Sidewalk gardens project

The Dieppe seniors' committee in collaboration with the City of Dieppe as well as the Sainte-Thérèse, Anna-Malenfant, Le Marais and Lou MacNarin schools, is a finalist for the South region in the Voilà! Contest presented by UNI Financial Cooperation with its sidewalk gardens project.

Each winning project will receive one of five grand prizes of up to $50,000. Online voting for client members will take place until November 16.

Here’s a description of the project

Every year the municipality invests several tens of thousands of dollars in planting flowers and plants to improve its image and beautify the city. However, these annual flowers and plants are just pulled up and thrown away at the end of the summer. Replacing the flowers and plants with vegetables would add value to the municipality’s annual investment. The harvest of fruits and vegetables would be distributed by being given to the region’s food bank.

A partnership would be developed with the schools in Dieppe and the grant would be used to build a total of four greenhouses. These would be very educational for students, in particular by teaching them healthy lifestyle habits. Besides giving them an opportunity to learn skills in a sort of educational laboratory, these greenhouses would give students outdoor physical activity, develop cooperation among schoolmates and strengthen their feeling of pride and accomplishment in giving to others. The project will also give them the benefits of the therapeutic effects of gardening, such as stress reduction.

So the students would be responsible for sprouting the various plants that would then be transplanted to various places in the municipality. To foster social inclusion and integration of newcomers to Dieppe, fruits and vegetables from their countries of origin would be planted as well.

Later, this could become an annual activity, with support from municipal staff, a volunteer activity where students and the Dieppe seniors’ committee would help each other to tend the gardens intergenerationally.

Then the totality of the harvest would be shared between the schools and the region’s food bank.