LifeScape Grows with GroundWorks

What do you get when you combine a group of graduated, and nearly graduated

senior boys together with older generation males with shovels and bucket, moms and

teachers, and then add a plethora of wheelchairs and otherwise abled teens? You get a

lesson in community and engagement.

GroundWorks Connect lives up to its name in ways that include connecting

education to agriculture and building that bridge. We also provide how organizations

such as Lifescape’s Pathways to Success Program can build, plant, and be part of

something they would not normally experience. While assisting with the construction of

2 teaching garden beds and filling them with soil after torrential rain seems like no big

deal, summer interns from AgroVive in Tea, SD cited the experience as lifechanging.

Students with like life goals and dreams but gifted with different abilities working

together, laughing, and growing relationships was like nothing many seniors had never

experienced. GroundWorks Connect’s staff partnered with Wesley United Methodist

Church, City of Sioux Falls Landfill, First Rate Excavate, and Natural Beauty Botanicals

to assist in planting beds that will produce more than the elements needed for salsa or

pizza, but the ingredients for lifelong learning.

Lifescape staff state it best, “From tomatoes to herbs, each classroom planted

ingredients to create their very own pizza sauce and salsa. It was a day full of learning,

laughter, and growth—celebrating inclusion and the joy of gardening for people of all

abilities.”