Our Vision

The Welcome Garden's vision is to welcome our new immigrants within a garden sanctuary offering a part time income, community support, an opportunity to develop language skills, and healing from immigration trauma. We strive to become better stewards of the land by growing organic produce with regenerative farming practices. We encourage community to volunteer in the garden and/or invest in our CSA shares to help support our new immigrants, make our project sustainable, and to grow this beloved community.

Our History

Vision Formation 2020-2022

Earth Day 2020 Anne has an epiphany at the Nashville Food Project's Grow Together Garden, where refugees grow and sell food through a CSA. Anne thought, "we could do that on our farm!"
Pandemic zooms with the Justice Salon, started by Francisco Garcia at St Augustine's chapel, bonds many of us who become part of the Welcome Garden team.
Connecting with Yuri Rodriguez, Costa Rica immigrant, seminarian at Sewanee and St Augustine's intern provides inspiration and encouragement
Anne meets the Miranda sisters, immigrants from Guatemala, through retired missionary friend, Becky Couts, who had started an international women's group at Anne and Doug's former church.
Spring 2022, members of the Justice Salon meet with the Miranda sisters on our farm sharing the vision of starting a garden to support new immigrants

Beginning the Garden 2022-2023

Summer 2022, Rod Sprang helps Anne and Doug begin running pigs and chickens on a 3 acre pasture to prepare soil for the garden
August 2022, regenerative farmer Tim Kercheville comes to the farm for a consultation
The Welcome Garden team is growing. Chris and Jenny Hoskins are on board as interpreters, Dan Fernandez, Francisco Garcia and Anne meet with the CCJ board to get help towards becoming a nonprofit; Rod and Debbie Sprang, Doug and Tim are on board; Jeanneth Miranda and her daughter commit to help.
Fall 2022, Anne, Doug, and Rod plow and till the field. Our first organized work group comes to spread covercrop seed and fence in the 1 acre area around the garden site.
Turnips explode! We have fertile soil!
Winter 2022-23 Tim has proposed a plan and we are on board. We have another volunteer work group plant 4 hedgerows of fruit trees, raspberries and elderberries. We mulch them deeply with hay, wood chips and innoculate with mycelium mushrooms to accelerate their growth.
Hedgerows and deep mulching throughout the garden is our way of keeping the garden hydrated; no irrigation system needed.
We build a farm fence around the garden. Sammy, our new livestock guardian dog and 2 of our grown pigs run the garden perimeter protecting it from wildlife.
Miranda sisters share about the Garden within the Latino community, and recruitment flyers for new immigrant workers are shared with Elyin Miranda's ESL class
Loads of hay and wood chips are delivered ongoingly

Our First Growing Season 2023

Planting begins in March and we begin working 2 days/week, 3 hours/day
Rod Sprang brings bees to the garden!
Earth Day in April 2023 we have a Welcome Garden Blessing with about 40 in attendance.
May 2023, the Welcome Garden becomes a nonprofit!
Tina Tsui joins our team followed shortly after by Anne Shepherd.
Our first harvest and CSA shares are distributed late May.
Second Harvest has agreed to partner with us and buys 10 shares which are shared with Latina friends and our friend, Jason Carney's African American church community. 10 full shares and almost 20 half shares are bought by the St As community. Leftover CSA shares are donated to Magdalen Houses.
Tim and the core team, several teens and several immigrant Latina friends work hard in the garden all summer every Thursday and Saturday distributing CSA shares at Vanderbilt every Sunday after church. Volunteer groups and individuals come help and visit throughout the season.
During this first growing season we have hosted several groups including 3 cottage dinner groups from St As, a large family group, St As youth group, a young adult group, a teen group from the Bethlehem Center, and our Justice Salon group, and the Southeastern Center for Cooperative Development reps.
December 16th we distribute our final CSA shares and the rest of our harvest of about 300 pounds was donated to the Madison Benevolence Center for tornado victims
This first season we harvested over 14,000 pounds of produce and about 6000 eggs
Winter 2023-24, we continue to harvest eggs and share with the Madison Benevolence Center

Our Team

Bert Bailey

Bert is our most recent core team member and new VP of the Welcome Garden board. He jumped in last fall after retiring from his career in business. Bert and his wife, Kim have been long term members at St Augustine's Chapel, and as old friends, connected Anne and Doug to this amazing community back in 2016. Bert is planning to help Tina with some of the Treasury responsibilities and is helping us with the business part of managing the Welcome Garden, drawing from his career experience.

Dan Fernandez

(At the left in a Justice Salon gathering) Dan and I met virtually during the pandemic on Justice Salon zooms. As an Enviromental lawyer he is passionate about eco justice and has gotten involved with TIPL, Tennessee Interfaith Power and Light. As a new transplant from Florida, moving to Nashville to be near his son, he has shown up ready to be involved and spent countless hours helping to work with the CCJ and other legal helpers to get the Welcome Garden non profit status achieved. Dan also is the son of Spanish immigrants, so having Spanish as a second language is coming in handy. Currently he is working on an Episcopal grant for the Welcome Garden, and he is delighted to be engaged to Kim Cannon, the new love of his life.

Francisco Garcia

Francisco is a visiting priest at St Augustine's and started the Justice Salon about 5 years ago. This community has been the source where most of the Welcome Garden team has come from. Francisco's presence at St Augustine's along with Yuri Rodriguez, who interned as a seminarian in recent years, have provided a wake up call to immigration justice issues, and this inspires the Welcome Garden to serve as a practical hands on way to help address the terrible injustices our Latino brothers and sisters are suffering with the current immigration crises in the US. Francisco has blessed the garden by helping us work with the CCJ towards getting our nonprofit status, leading us in our Garden blessing as we began our first season, and assisting in grant writing, and connecting us with the SEC4CD. Francisco has a beautiful family, Rebecca, Maya, Kyla and Ean. Rebecca and Maya made some awesome bilingual signs for the garden this past year.

Anne and Doug Hardin

Anne is director of the Welcome Garden and Doug is Anne's partner for life and and a great support person in this adventure. Anne was inspired by TIPL and The Nashville Food project's Grow Together Garden, and when she wanted to start a similar project on their farm using some inheritance to help get it started, Doug got on board. They both love bringing community out to the farm and sharing the blessing of the garden sanctuary to especially help new immigrants, but also volunteers, find stress relief and healing from the everyday burdens our poor planet and humanity are suffering from. Anne and Doug have lived on the farm for 30 years where they have raised 3 daughters. Their oldest daughter, Amy, and their 3 grandkids, Lily, Steven and Rose, and middle daughter, Chesney and her partner, Will, also live on the farm. Anne retired from nursing early to help with grandkids and the farm, and has been involved with TIPL and the Justice Salon since she and Doug joined St Augustines in 2016. Doug continues to work in the Vanderbilt Math Department and is currently contemplating when to retire as he approaches 40 years in his career in 2 years.

Chris and Jenny Hoskins

Chris and Jenny have been serving for years in Ecuador with their two children. Chris is the current president of the Welcome Garden board. He is also working on his phd in religion, psychology and culture at Vanderbilt and has been a regular presence within the Justice Salon; Jenny works virtually with their mission board they've worked with over recent years. With their accomplished Spanish language skills and heart for the Latino immigrant friends we are meeting, they have been vital forces within the growth of the Welcome Garden and its primary vision to support new immigrants. Currently they are helping support our Latino workers in training with the Southeastern Center for Cooperative Development.The Hoskin kids have been important friends to Anne and Doug's grandkids, and all the children all got baptized in our spring fed creek with St Augustine's families spring 2022. The Hoskin kids called the farm their “new happy place!”

Tim Kercheville

Tim is our regenerative farmer who has proved he can transform an empty field into a full fledged productive garden in one year at the Welcome Garden. Tim came highly recommended by David Wells with the Davidson County Soil and Water District where Anne has attended Farm Day workshops over the years. Raised by farmers in California and Kentucky, Tim comes to us with 11 years of farming experience and works with several other gardens and CSA's in middle Tennessee. He currently resides with Hidden Gem Farm in Springhill, Tennessee. Tim is truly a force of nature when it comes to farming and is a great encourager to all our new immigrant worker friends and volunteers at the Welcome Garden.

Kim Matthews

Kim Matthews has recently joined our Welcome Garden board serving as Secretary. Kim has been very active within the Justice Salon group since it’s inception. She has been a strong advocate towards ending gun violence, but also serves as a great networker as she supports many of Justice Salon justice issues. Kim currently works at the Lotus Room; she and her husband, Will, reside in West Nashville and have a daughter and a son.

Jeanneth and Gensis Miranda

Jeanneth Miranda and her daughter, Genesis have been regular and devoted volunteers to the Welcome Garden since we first began sharing the vision together with Jeanneth's sisters and our Justice Saloon members back in Spring 2022. Jeanneth and her sisters, Elyin and Leslie all immigrated from Guatemala when they were young adults and live in Hendersonville where they have been working and raising families and settling into their lives in a new country. Jeanneth co-pastors at a nearby Latino Church and has spread the word within the Latino community about us, and she and Genesis have been regular volunteers at the Welcome Garden in our first year. Jeanneth's sister Elyin teaches an ESL class at a nearby church, Anne and Doug used to attend, and has also been very helpful in spreading the word for us.

Abdias Rodríguez

Abdias immigrated from the Dominican Republic and first came to the Welcome Garden when we had our garden blessing in April of 2023 and has been coming back ever since. Abdias has a joyful, gregarious spirit, and to know her is to love her even with some of our language divide. She brought her teenage son, Raphael, to the garden over the summer where he became almost as involved as his mom and his favorite thing to do is to transport the harvest from the garden to the basement where it is sorted and weighed. Abdias also attends Anne and Doug's former church, where their friend Becky Couts, a retired African career missionary, started an International Women's group. This group has been a great place to connect with some of ourLatina friends such as the Miranda sisters and Leticia who send new immigrant friends our way.

Anne Enright Shepherd

Anne began coming to the Welcome Garden early in the summer of 2023 and has declared herself to be our official Chicken and Egg Wrangler. Anne has shown up almost every week during our 30 week CSA to water and feed the chickens, and organize our eggs for the CSA distribution. She then joins Tina and Debbie in the basement where she uses her expert organizing skills to help weigh and prepare the produce for CSA distribution. Anne is a regular, faithful member at St Augustines, and she and her husband have raised 2 daughters and are enjoying a newly emptied nest. Anne will need to take a break from the garden this spring for health reasons, but we can't wait to get her back hopefully in time to begin wrangling eggs for our second CSA season!

Rod and Debbie Sprang

Rod Sprang is outgoing president of the Welcome Garden board, and ongoing farm consultant. He has been with us since the beginning helping us prepare the field with chickens and pigs, hiring Tim, plowing the earth, bringing bees and regularly showing up. He and his family come from Ohio and he and Debbie live just 3 miles as the crow flies from our farm. By trade Rod is a pharmaceutical rep, but he is also a “jack of all trades” and passionate about gardening and social justice he brings to the Welcome Garden and Justice Salon. Debbie is our inspired encourager. When she first heard about our project she said, “That’s the Holy Spirit at work!” She works at Belmont University in alumni relations, been part of the Justice Salon and a devoted Welcome Garden core team member. Debbie helps recruit and welcome volunteers, gets us organized, sorts produce, and distributes CSA shares. Debbie and Rod have 2 daughters who live locally and a son who works globally in humanitarian aid.

Tina Tsui

Tina and I first met out at the Welcome Garden and she was introduced to the Justice Salon by Brenda Huff. What a find she was! Tina has wholeheartedly thrown herself into the Welcome Garden as Treasurer and loving the community. Tina has great tech skills in managing our budget, but she really loves getting her hands in the dirt and spreading the good news about the Welcome Garden. Tina is passionate about her faith, growing organic produce and community as she helps sort and weigh the harvests, distributes CSA shares, and keeps track of our CSA investors. She is an empty nester and getting ready to retire from Vanderbilt so she is all in!