• Calendar |
• Libraries |
• Maps |
• Departments |
• MyUNC

Growing goodwill

She was the 14th of 15 children in a northern Orange County family. The family also raised most of what appeared on their kitchen table. Webster, like her older siblings, was working in the vegetable garden and tobacco fields by age six.

A longing for the simpler times of her childhood is part of the reason Webster, a social research specialist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, has regularly volunteered during the spring and summer in the Carolina Campus Community Garden. It also has been a learning experience of sorts, a way to rekindle skills once passed down from generation to generation in order to survive.

Webster’s daughter Briana, a 2004 Carolina graduate, also has volunteered in the garden while visiting from Washington, D.C., and has asked to learn how to can. Webster admits she needs a refresher course herself.

The Community Garden is a way to reach out to others, and that really is the primary reason Webster volunteers. It has also been the garden's mission since Claire Lorch proposed it last year. Lorch serves in a part-time position as garden coordinator through the North Carolina Botanical Garden, which is  the University’s official sponsor for the initiative.

Lorch said campus support for the garden has never wavered since March when some 75 people, including faculty and staff members, students and community neighbors, spent a large part of a weekend preparing the soil for the 8,000-square-foot garden, which sits on a University-owned lot near the west side of campus.

Lorch continues to rely on the steady help of volunteers such as Webster, who work during two-hour blocks of time on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons to tend to watering, weeding and picking.

Since early summer, there have been twice-a-week food distributions directed toward the University’s lowest paid employees - primarily housekeepers such as Patricia Noell.

“I’m here every time she (Lorch) comes,” Noell says.

The free fresh vegetables spare her the expense of buying them, she said. And a day or two before payday, when her refrigerator is nearly as bare as her wallet, Noell has more than once turned half a squash into a full meal.

As Webster has learned, you don’t have to get vegetables from the garden to take something good from working in it. There is a shared purpose, a bond that grows from joining hands to make a small difference in the lives of others.