For eight Allen County moms, NEP Advisor Veronica Briles’ Learn, Grow, Eat & Go class offers friendship, hope, and a new – more joyful – way of experiencing life. These courageous women are charting a new path forward by learning how to garden.

“This is a group of women who have suffered from domestic violence,” Veronica said. “They want to learn more about gardening and to educate their children.”

The class was offered at Fort Wayne’s Center for Nonviolence, an organization designed to help people experiencing domestic and other forms of violence.

“These women are wise, and their survival stories are shocking,” Veronica said. “We cried and laughed.”

Learn, Grow, Eat & Go is designed to teach people how to grow their own food. It covers topics like the parts of plants, what vegetation needs to grow, and why humans need fruits and vegetables in their diets. It also includes hands-on food demos and physical activities.

For Veronica’s participants, it was a chance to learn a skill that could be passed on to the next generation. Along the way, they discovered nurturing the ground nourishes their souls.

“At the end of the class, they told me that this class was therapy for them,” Veronica said. “They enjoyed it.”