The UMD Community Learning Garden (CLG) is a collaborative space where students, faculty and staff put into practice lessons about the importance of food production, environmental stewardship, agricultural sustainability, physical activity, and balanced diets. It serves as a living classroom for experiential education, and as a central meeting point and community building tool for the University of Maryland and greater College Park. The garden grows a diversity of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers - donating 100% of every season’s harvest to the UMD Campus Pantry to improve community food security. Founded by students in 2011, the garden is an ongoing partnership between the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Facilities Management, the Office of Sustainability, the Department of Dining Services, and the School of Public Health.

The CLG’s half-acre footprint includes an ADA-accessible teaching garden, a bioretention facility and collected stormwater reuse irrigation system, an orchard, native pollinator habitat and research, and an herbal tea garden. The CLG hosts a student club, weekly volunteer hours, classes from across campus, tours and educational activities for groups, independent student research projects, and internships. The CLG’s focus on hands-on, real-world skill development and cross-campus partnerships have made it a sought-after model for gardens at other universities and in nearby communities.

The Community Learning Garden VIP team will be fully integrated into garden planning and management to support emergency food production for the Campus Pantry and hands-on learning opportunities for students and community members. Additionally, the VIP team will engage in mixed methods research to identify the most impactful crops to produce for the pantry and the impact of on-campus emergency food production on campus food insecurity rates. The team will prepare posters, infographics, reports, and presentations about the CLG and campus food security to present at annual conferences, including the Maryland Student Affairs Conference, the Northeast Student Food and Farm Conference, and the Urban Food Systems Symposium.