The GreenHouse

Come with me on a journey. In your imagination, walk with me through our block on a warm spring day. The sky is blue overhead, and you feel the warmth in the air as you step through the gate and into the apartment complex. You’re stepping into a community that is home to more than one thousand people, living side by side in high-density apartments in the richly diverse community of Gardenland/Northgate in Sacramento.

As we walk through the apartments, you hear languages from all over the world. Spanish, English, Dari, Ukrainian, Pashto, Russian, and Arabic echo down from windows and open doorways. Delicious smells of cooking from a myriad of different cultures waft around you as you pass door after door.

Everywhere you look, children dart past you. Of the thousand people living on this block, more than five hundred are children, making this place one of the highest density of children per capita in the six-county Sacramento region. Kids laugh, kick soccer balls, play tag, race scooters. You have to watch your feet sometimes as they whip past!

There’s an incredible richness here, a vibrancy in the fabric of lives, cultures, and experiences woven together. There are also struggles. Some of it you see right off, walking through: broken-down vehicles and the disrepair of unresponsive landlords. Trash lining the only walking path to the local store. Other things take time and trust to uncover; food scarcity haunting parents as they seek to provide for their children. Community fear and trauma when local violence flares up. The vulnerability of navigating the school system in a second language.

And children everywhere you look, growing up in the midst of it all.

The GreenHouse was founded in this unique location 21 years ago. We are located at the heart of this block, and from that place our mission is to nurture young people holistically -- emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically – as they grow to their full potential. That looks like reading with elementary kids week by week as they develop skills and learn to love books in our after-school programs. It looks like field trips, as kids explore our region and expand their horizons through our summer camp. It looks like proofreading high school students’ college essays, or hosting internships so they develop job skills. It looks like serving as references for first jobs or teaching teens to drive. It looks like praying with youth or parents, weeping with those who weep, and rejoicing with those who rejoice. 

Day by day, The GreenHouse walks beside youth and families in this special place, through the beauty and the struggle of growing up here. We hope you will join us today in investing in our young people!