Life Lab In the News - Unpaved Paradise: Life Lab Made a Parking Lot into a Garden

Good Times - December 18, 2024

By Elizabeth Borelli

Unlike many of Northern California’s most groundbreaking ideas, this one skipped the garage in favor of a parking lot. In the late 1970s, before the rise of Silicon Valley startups, a small group of educators from the Live Oak School District came together to transform an abandoned parking lot at Green Acres Elementary School into a vibrant, thriving garden.

That marked the beginning of Life Lab—one of the 63 organizations to which Good Times readers can donate during Santa Cruz Gives.

The founders envisioned the gardens as living laboratories where students could go beyond studying science to making hands-on discoveries, just like real scientists. This concept inspired the name Life Lab, reflecting the idea of a garden as a living laboratory. This visionary approach laid the foundation, and it continues to grow and evolve over the years.

Life Lab Executive Director Whitney Cohen, who joined the organization in 2007 as program director, stepped into her current role this past summer. She explains that in 2000, Life Lab established the garden classroom on the UC Santa Cruz campus, which they rent from UCSC. As an independent nonprofit, Life Lab works closely with UCSC while occupying and maintaining the Demonstration Gardens on campus.

Cohen says, “We’ve expanded our mission to cultivate a love of learning with nourishing food provided through garden-based education. Today we have a network of thousands of educators throughout the country who use our curriculum and our professional development trainings to implement school gardens. It’s the heart of what we do at Life Lab.

“And I think it’s important to note that this is happening in a school context, where indoors all day under fluorescent lights doesn’t work well for many children,” Cohen adds.

“The second way to experience Life Lab is through field trips and summer camps held in the garden classroom,” Cohen explains.

“We believe that when children have regular positive experiences, like in natural outdoor garden classrooms, they develop a connection to place. And then as they caretake that place through watering and planting the seeds, they also develop internally, a sense of purpose and pride and kinship with each other and with the world around them.”

Read the full article here.

Donate to Life Lab with Santa Cruz Gives here.