Terra BIRDS school garden, community garden, and work programs stewards over 13 acres of land in the City of Flagstaff.  

Terra BIRDS was founded in 2011. We began by offering support to elementary school teachers and administrators who wanted to establish school garden programs that brought the classroom outside.  We began by designing and teaching school garden classes at one elementary school with one part-time staff member. Students and teachers alike valued our unique approach to garden design, on-site problem solving, and putting students at the center of the process to become the active stewards of their school grounds. The need for our School Garden Program quickly grew throughout the school district. Over the last decade, we have grown our programs, staff, and organizational capacity and now teach over 2,000 students in 13 different schools with five staff members.

As our programs expanded into other places, including the Coconino County Regional Accommodation School District and the Juvenile Detention and Transition School, we rapidly saw the additional need to address some of the challenging educational, environmental, and socio-economic issues we are facing as a community. We began providing sustainability oriented education for more young people, green jobs training for at-risk youth, community access to healthy foods and outdoor activities, and environmentally sustainable urban habitats for people and wildlife.

In addition to our robust School Garden Program, we offer job training and employment opportunities to local at-risk youth through our Green Jobs Program; we also help steward Flagstaff’s community garden spaces and other urban habitats.

Terra BIRDS is committed to social and environmental transformation.  Through gardening and outdoor based learning, Terra BIRDS engages youth of varying ages in projects that are educational, ecologically sound, and beneficial to organisms both great and small.  We believe that the experience of gardening awakens the awareness that life is interconnected and that the health and well-being of any organism--including ourselves--is inextricably linked to the health and well-being of all organisms.  We not only grow healthy food in our school and community gardens, we grow healthy kids, empowered youth, and a strong community.