This week, Good Earth Plant Company worked on one of its favorite assignments for the Alpha Project.
Good Earth Plant Company unloads plant at their new home at the Alpha Project in Imperial Beach.
A brand new Alpha Project homeless shelter opened in a completely renovated hotel in Imperial Beach. It’s a safe and secure place focusing on housing families. We provided a little extra plant love to warm up the new residences. We donated some of our client plant returns for common areas and hallways, and anywhere else Alpha Project wanted to put them.
It gives us joy on so many levels. We re-home these plants where they can find a new purpose. It’s like adopting a new pet from a shelter. And we never, ever get tired of the amazing response we get from the residents from something as simple as having plants and nature in their lives. I imagine it’s a sign of hope reminding them of the beauty and resilience of nature and how it can inspire them to hang in there and look forward to better days themselves. All we need is a little help.
Our donated plants find new homes with the new residents of the Alpha Project’s brand new residence in Imperial Beach.
The truth is that we get WAY more out of it ourselves. Our entire team feels so good about what they do when we they see the reaction. We enrich lives with plants, what could be better than this?
A meaningful anniversary with Alpha Project
It was special the very first time we donated plants to the Alpha Project in 2016 and it’s just as special to us four years later.
It wasn’t until later as I started putting this blog together that I realized we first wrote about working with the Alpha Project on September 1, 2016. So this is our third facility and fourth anniversary! Another milestone in the history of Good Earth Plant Company!
It wasn’t too much longer before we started our “Plants With Purpose” program, inviting nonprofit organizations to contact us for plant donations from our recycled stock of plants. These are the “dented cans” and scratched furniture of our world. They’re perfectly good but not as pretty as they need to be for our commercial clients.
Jim Mumford shares a few tips on plant care with a new plant parent at Sharp Grossmont Hospital.
Since then, we have donated plants to the UCSD Volunteer Doula Program, St. Madeleine Sophies Center, and High Tech High among many others. This year when the coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring, we worked with some of our favorite wholesale plant nurseries including Leucadia Nursery and Olive Hill to arrange the donation of plants to frontline healthcare heroes working at Sharp Grossmont Hospital, UCSD Medical Center, Kaiser Otay Mesa, Kaiser Bonita, and Scripps Chula Vista. We ended up donating $50,000 worth of beautiful plants. I never could have imagined our program would grow like this.
Looking back, it reminds me of several things. First, our community’s homeless problem hasn’t gone away, far from it. The efforts of Alpha Project and other providers continues, and we need to continue to do what we can to support them. They’ve done an amazing job considering the pandemic situation. Let’s not forget this problem.
We enrich peoples’ lives with plants!
The Plants With Purpose program also reminds me everyone deserves the many benefits of plants in their environment. This is why we are so passionate about adding plants into our everyday life by providing plant styling, indoor plant services, and Plantscaping to workplaces, to public spaces like building lobbies and courtyards, and living walls, moss walls, and green roofs to buildings, residences, restaurants, and hospitals. We’re grateful to be the eco-warriors who help facilitate this.
Do what you can to add plants to your own environment and your immediate community. It’s so important to make parks a priority to give everyone access to nature, no matter where they live. Plant trees whenever you can. These gifts will live on and benefit more people than you’ll ever know.
One warning: you’ll get addicted to how good it feels. Isn’t this something we could all use in these crazy and confusing times? Stay planted!
