News

Small and Mighty: Lettuce Turnip the Beet Community and School Garden Association

The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Small and Mighty program awarded $15,000 to Lettuce Turnip the Beet Community and School Garden Association in 2020. The organization builds, cultivates and sustains a beautiful life through sustainability education programming and access to fresh local food. It offers sustainability education programming for children from birth up to grade 12. These out-of-school support programs are sequential, active, focused and offer explicit skill-building activities that emphasize character development and social skills.

This grant will support its Our Helping Meals (OHM) program, which provides no-contact delivery of prepared meals, dry goods, gardening supplies, personal care items, and local produce and dairy to single-family households and economically disadvantaged, immunosuppressed and elderly individuals. OHM incorporates free wellness workshops for all participants as well as school staff, economically disadvantaged college students and young adults. 

The Small and Mighty grants program, an outcome of the Foundation’s focus on poverty and inequality, has, as of Dec. 2020, awarded $1.6 million to nonprofit organizations with budgets of less than $600,000.

Pittsburgh eateries helping the community while weathering their own storm

AMPD Group, an entertainment and hospitality management company, is channeling its inner hardship into an emergency meal distribution program, Our Helping Meals (OHM). The program, founded by Jamie Marie Christian, executive director of the Lettuce Turnip the Beet Sustainability Collective — with help from Stacie Kennelly and Sara-Summer Oliphant — distributes thousands of homemade meals in the South Hills. AMPD Group reopened the kitchen doors of its Steel Cactus restaurant in Bethel Park to prepare 600 to 800 meals using donated food items from the company’s other locations, while closely following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines and regulations.

OHM is also providing a virtual diaper delivery, food box delivery, CSA delivery for those who are immune-compromised, and children’s games and activities for pickup and delivery. Meal deliveries can be requested by calling or texting Jamie at 412-334-8631 between 5 p.m. the night before and 7 a.m. on the day of delivery. Emergency packs can be requested at any time. To volunteer or make a donation, call 412-334-8631 or email Jamie.Christian@ltbcsga.org.