Education Costa Rica Project #39986

Fund a Sustainable School Vegetable Garden

by Action Change (Formerly GVI Trust)

Project Report | Nov 3, 2026
Nutritious meals for happy students

By William Day | Impact and Operations Officer

Dear friends, donors, and interested people,

In impoverished areas, one of the biggest barriers to acccessing education (beyond the existence of schools themselves) is food. If children can't get enough food and nutrition throughout the day it becomes difficult to focus in class given that they don't have enough energy, or vitamins & minerals to power them through the day. Our partner school in Costa Rica tackles this by maintaining a fruit and vegetable garden in the playground, providing tomatoes, mangoes, bananas, lettuce, and more to students: a vital lifeline for them all.

Currently the garden is a small, traditional soil-based setup, but in future we would like to expand this in one of two ways. The first option is to simply plant more vegetables across a larger patch of land, but the barrier to this is obvious - a lack of land to plant on. The second option is to implement an aquaponics system; this style of farming can produce an incredible amount more vegetables per square metre but is expensive to install. Therefore your donations are needed more than ever to help grow this project into something unrecognisable and truly self-sustaining.

Thank you for supporting us.

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Jul 7, 2026
Growing minds growing gardens

By shayle havemann | Project leader

Mar 9, 2026
Veggie Garden's Are A Huge Hit

By Tyrone Bennett | CEO of Action Change

Children Love The Veggie Garden at School

To the wonderful community backing our gardens,

Something incredible is happening. Over the past few years, we have carefully built five vegetable gardens in primary schools across Costa Rica, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. The transformation at these schools has been so profound that the word is spreading, and we are now being overwhelmed with requests from other communities desperate to do the same.

The need is immediate and widespread:

Siyakhula Preschool, South Africa: Located in an urban township, this school provides education for 52 children who often face days with no food at all, or just plain pap or rice. They are a concrete school with no soil for planting, so our mission is to purchase safe, nearby land to install a garden that can feed these children 365 days a year.
Zimbabwe: We have 23 schools currently on our waitlist, all calling for a garden to help stabilize their school feeding programs.
Guatemala: After hearing about the success of our Costa Rican garden, two schools have reached out to us, eager to transform their own school meals in 2026.

We have the volunteers ready to break ground, and we have the expertise to make these gardens flourish. The only piece of the puzzle missing is the funding to get these projects off the ground.

We currently have 73 dedicated supporters following this project. While I am so grateful for every one of you, to meet this surge in demand, we need to grow our network. This is where you come in.

The Little by Little campaign is our best chance to make this happen. Between March 17th and the 20th, GlobalGiving will match every donation up to 50 dollars at 50 percent.

Your 50 dollar donation becomes 75 dollars.
That amount helps us secure the land, seeds, tools, and irrigation needed to get these gardens growing.

Please share this plan and our need with your personal networks. If each of you can bring just one new person into our circle, we can exponentially increase our reach and turn these dreams into reality for hundreds of children. What do you think? Are you ready to help us grow?

Thank you for being the soil in which this project thrives. We are so excited to see what we can build together this year.

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