McKenna Manzo / Arizona Sonoran News

As federal funding cuts dismantle nutrition education programs across Arizona, one small school garden in Tucson is quietly pushing back, teaching students not just how to grow food, but how to survive without the safety nets that once supported them.

The Garden Project, a partnership between Sunnyside Unified School District’s Teenage Parent Program and Exceptional Education department, started during COVID-19 when program director Maria Luna applied for a grant, hoping to create a safe outdoor learning space.

Both programs support students by providing individualized instruction and services that recognize their unique strengths and needs. The goal is to help them build a strong foundation for future college, career and life readiness.

The garden began as an inclusive green space shared by students with severe disabilities and later evolved into a hands-on nutrition program for young parents learning how to plant, harvest and prepare food for their families.

“The idea was initially to create a space for safe outside learning, a healthy environment to learn and destress,” Luna said.

These days, the garden operates with far fewer students than it once served. TAPP’s enrollment at Sunnyside has dropped from nearly 40 students 12 years ago to just six parenting or expecting students this school year.

Last summer, Luna and her students planted squash and learned to make calabacitas with the harvest. Students also learn to make homemade baby food, a skill Luna sees as an essential form of future-proofing against food insecurity.

A garden filling nutrition education gaps

Shrinking federal support for nutrition education makes programs like Luna’s more important than ever.

SNAP-Ed, once a more than $530 million national program, was defunded in September. For years, it supported Arizona schools with materials, gardens, trails and healthy lunchroom initiatives. Now schools rely only on the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, a much smaller initiative aimed at teaching families basic cooking, budgeting and nutrition skills.

“SNAP-ED and EFNEP worked really well together,” said Shea Austin Cantu, director of the Community Nutrition Education Program at the University of Arizona. “SNAP-Ed wrapped around healthy infrastructure like gardens, parks, walking groups, while EFNEP worked directly with individuals and families.”

Without SNAP-Ed’s broader, community-based support, Cantu said it will be difficult to make up the difference. She is now trying to rebuild a statewide nutrition education workforce with almost no funding.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “We’ll have to braid funding, find partners and piece things together. The mandate to provide nutrition education is still there, it is just not funded.”

For Luna, that gap is already visible. Young parents in the TAPP program feel the strain of rising food costs first, she said. The garden serves as a backup plan, not just a lesson, teaching skills students can draw on in the future if they need to grow their own food.

“If ever in their future there’s difficulty, I want them to know that they can always garden and grow food for their family,” Luna said.

A campus where multiple gardens fill the gap

Luna’s garden is not the only space in Tucson working to fill nutrition gaps for local students.

At Sunnyside’s outdoor education center, science teacher Melany Coates has built a separate, student-designed space that blends engineering, ecosystem science and food production.

Coates’ project began in 2020, during COVID-19, when her environmental science students used lessons from Project Water Education Today and Watershed Management Group to design a quarter-acre rain-harvesting system.

Students have since expanded the site to include a pollinator garden, stormwater testing areas and an aquaponics system.

“Students take more ownership because they’ve designed, built and cared for the space,” Coates said. “They become stewards of the land.”

Coates’ space operates separately from Luna’s garden, but both programs share a goal: giving students tools to understand food, water and climate challenges at a time when federal support is shrinking.

“These spaces empower students,” Coates said. “Instead of feeling helpless, they learn they can grow their own food, they can provide energy to their homes … it emboldens them to take action in their community.”

Creating conversations

Some of the most powerful outcomes of the garden program were not part of its original goals, Luna said. Teachers and counselors now bring students into the garden when they are anxious, overwhelmed or new to the school.

“I get to meet students of all different abilities, all different backgrounds,” Luna said.

Many come for volunteer hours or simply to sit on the adaptive swings and de-stress. The garden has become a calming space where students talk more openly while working side by side.

“We have rich conversations that students may have difficulty having face to face,” she said. “It’s almost like we trick them in there.”

Luna said some teachers might resent her for having what she calls a dream job of holding babies and gardening. But her passion comes from lived experience. She was once a teen parent herself.

“The TAPP program at TUSD saved my life,” she said.

She sees her work as a way to return that support.

“If their goal is to graduate and go to college, we’re here so they can achieve that goal, regardless of the path they had to take,” she said.

Facing the future

A new voter-approved bond will soon bring major construction to Sunnyside schools, and the garden will be demolished as part of the remodel. Luna sees it as an opportunity, not an ending.

“I’m super happy that I’ll get to give my input,” she said.

Luna said the new space will be an indoor atrium, and she plans to volunteer to maintain it. The garden will be smaller but more manageable, fitting the shrinking TAPP population and Luna’s future plans to share tools with other campuses.

“Little by little it will grow,” she said.

Across Arizona, nutrition education programs now rely on a patchwork of gardens, local efforts, social media outreach, community markers and personal relationships. At the center are people like Luna and Cantu, who refuse to let the system collapse entirely.

“We need to be like water,” Cantu said. “If we can’t flow, we freeze and break the thing and keep going.”

In Sunnyside, that resilience looks like a small garden where students learn how to feed themselves, talk about their lives and take home squash to make dinner. It is not a replacement for federal funding, but it is a lifeline, planted one seed at a time.

Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism. 

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