Starting in 2023, increasingly concerned about the climate crisis, Pace e Bene launched the Environmental Healing Grants program to provide grant funding to local projects that capture carbon, rebuild ecosystems, and heal the Earth. The funds for this come from a fee we add to the necessary travel our organization conducts. Rather than participating in large-scale, unverifiable carbon offset programs, we decided to work directly with on-the-ground communities.

One of these communities is West Jessamine High School in Kentucky. We gave them (literal) seed money to implement a student-created design to replace a lawn in the yard of the school with a wild and native plants garden. Three extracurricular clubs from West Jessamine High School worked together on the Unity Garden. 

Over the summer of 2023, high school students built the first stages of a wild and native plants garden in the yard outside their school. They laid down cardboard over the lawn and then covered it with natural mulch, which smothers the grass and weeds and traps moisture in the soil. The grass and weeds decompose as earthworms eat the cardboard and feed the soil with organic matter, improving the quality of the soil. This is called "sheet mulching." Then they planted the first shrubs and trees.

The West Jessamine Unity Garden includes native trees, shrubs, flowers, and ground coverings that are most beneficial to the local environment based on student research. When fully built, it will provide food and shelter to wildlife and pollinators and also improve the environment by helping to fight soil erosion, filter pollutants, absorb carbon dioxide, and produce oxygen. Students designed the garden layout and prepared the soil. They will continue to plant and care for the plants by watering, fertilizing, and weeding as needed to maintain the space. 

In the grant proposal, the students wrote: “The Unity Garden will help improve our school climate by building positive relationships between students from different backgrounds and social circles working together on a project of shared interest and value. We hope that this project will make a lasting impact on the environment both inside and outside of the school.”

A new club—the Garden Club—has grown out of this effort, and already has 20-30 students meeting weekly. These students will soon begin winter sowing with seeds for native ground cover and more native flowers for the garden. More updates will come in the spring. 

The Unity Garden was created as a collaboration between three other clubs. The West Jessamine High School Social Justice Club is a student-led organization that was created as a safe place for students to discuss different issues of social justice while practicing respect, empathy and open-mindedness, sharing ideas to improve our school & community, and empowering students to make a difference. The West Jessamine Environmental Club is another student-led initiative to reduce our school's carbon footprint by recycling and hosting an annual community tree planting event with Tree-Plenish. Students from the local FFA chapter (also known as the Future Farmers of America) who are also enrolled in agriculture classes at the Jessamine Career & Technology Center are also joining in to learn about the benefits of native plants while helping design and install the Unity Garden. 

Pace e Bene is thrilled that the Environmental Healing Grant has fostered such a beautiful project—and that so many students are engaging with it. We would like to thank Franciscan Action Network for partnering with us in this work. The carbon offset fees for our shared Pilgrimage To Assisi in 2024 funded this first round of grantees. We also recognize that no carbon offset program can justify a large carbon footprint and that we must reduce our fuel and energy use. Pace e Bene strives to keep our overall carbon footprint low, including building a regional trainers network and hosting virtual events for most of our activities.