“Eat your vegetables!”
It’s a familiar refrain heard in homes across America day in and day out as parents seek to encourage their children to eat healthy and get the nutrients they need. For The Journey Home, an outreach center in the Murfreesboro, TN, area that supports the homeless and other individuals in need, vegetables offer more than just a way to provide nutrients.
The Journey Home has a garden where it grows vegetables that it provides as food to its clients as well as sells to the community to help support the additional work it does, including providing employment assistance, a laundry facility, and housing for those in need.
To help the center be able to sell its vegetables to more people, Scout Casey C. from the Boy Scouts of America Middle Tennessee Council focused his Eagle Scout project on building a mobile vegetable cart that could be taken to various events around the community. It was a process that took nearly two years.
When Casey started the project, he was given an old, rusty trailer. Over the course of several months, Casey and teams of volunteers worked on restoring the trailer, replacing rotted wood, refurbishing broken portions, and rewiring it. Once the trailer was completed, work began on creating the vegetable stand that would sit atop the trailer.
We’ve been excited about having Casey work on this project,”said Scott Foster, director and founder of The Journey Home community outreach program. “By having the vegetable stand, it helps draw awareness to the work we’re doing a well as selling produce to help fund the work program we have going on.”
The mobile vegetable cart took a long time to complete, but it will serve the community for many years to come.
“It’s good to have organizations like Boy Scouts to get involved in serving those in need in the community,” Foster said. “And it’s good to see it play out this way. Service is one of the core values.”
To learn more about the massive amount of work that went into this Eagle Scout project, be sure to read the full story in the Daily News Journal.
To learn more about the positive impact that Scouting can have on young people like Casey, be sure to check out this article on the recent Tufts study, and watch this video:
