Creating beauty, growing healthy food!
Unlikely bedfellows Food Well Alliance and Tito’s Handmade Vodka frequently team up to work on projects that help build community gardens and urban farms. When they learned that Heaven’s Corner community garden on James P. Brawley Drive in Westside needed a little extra love, they staged an October event.
Food Well, whose mission is to provide resources and support to local growers to connect and build healthier communities, has worked with the philanthropic arm of the company, Love, Tito’s, for the last three years. “It supports urban gardens and even has a large garden for employees at the Austin, Texas, distillery,” says Kate Conner, executive director of Food Well Alliance.
Rosario Hernandez, executive director of the five greenspaces in the Historic Westside Gardens collection, has helped the gardens grow into gathering places. “At Heaven’s Corner, volunteers from Tito’s, Food Well, and residents rebuilt garden beds, created a pollinator garden, planted flowers and vegetables, raked and mulched, built picnic tables and replaced the ADA pathways,” she says.
Nearby, there’s graffiti on an abandoned house. “(It) reads, ‘Being poor is not a crime, says Pam Burton, division manager of Tito’s Westside office. “It echoes the ‘can-do’ attitude of the residents who showed up to help us refurbish the garden.”
TITO’S HANDMADE VODKA
titosvodka.com/love
@titosvodka
FOOD WELL ALLIANCE
foodwellalliance.org
@foodwellalliance
HISTORIC WESTSIDE GARDENS
historicwestsidegardens.org
@historic_westside_gardens
