Third place vote-recipient and winner of a $1,000 grant
Insight Garden Program (IGP) facilitates an innovative environmental education curriculum combined with vocational gardening and landscaping training, so that people in prison can reconnect to self, community, and the natural world. This “inner” and “outer” gardening approach transforms lives, ends ongoing cycles of incarceration, and creates safer communities. Our program operates at the intersection of environment, criminal justice, and physical, behavioral, and mental health issues and provides people in prison with the tools and resources needed to become role models for others in prison, and in their communities upon release.
Since 2002, Insight Garden Program has successfully managed a program on H-Unit at San Quentin Prison. Over the past 16 years, IGP has designed, installed and maintained two gardens on H-Unit and has worked with over 1000 participants, many of whom have gone on to be successfully employed by green sector employers including our community partner Planting Justice.