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Community Corner

Milagro Allegro Garden Proposal Earns Perfect Score

Four elementary schools will have community gardens accompanied by a 12-week nutrition program, if the grant is approved.

Milagro Allegro Community Garden is one step closer to receiving needed funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a study that would examine childhood obesity in Northeast Los Angeles' Latino neighborhoods

As on Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch  last month, Milagro Allegro Community Garden has teamed up withthrough its L.A. Sprouts nutrition program for a study that will look into the benefits of community gardens.

While Milagro Allegro has not yet officially secured funding, the grant proposal they submitted to NIH recieved a perfect score, which Milagro Allegro director Nicole Gatto said "positions us extremely well for the proposal to be funded."

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“We’ll know more once we have a percentile, that’s the way the NIH grants work. They start with a score then move to a percentile and the percentile is what determines the funding,” Gato said. “These days funding is really hard to come by, in terms of that it’s really hard to gauge, but based on our score which was very, very good, it does position us very well to be funded."

According to Gatto, three elementary schools—Loreto Street, Cesar Chavez, and Sierra Park-- in addition to , have been included in the grant. Cesar Chavez and Sierra Park Elementary Schools are located in El Sereno. Loreto Street Elementary School, which was home to the L.A. Sprouts Program last fall,  is located in Cypress Park.

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If the grant is approved, Milagro Allegro Community Garden would receive $250,000 in funding, distributed over the course of two years. Once the funding is secured, Gatto said the gardens will be built at the schools this fall and the program would start in January.

Gatto said, “This is going to be a randomized study, so it’s going to take the pilot work that we did up a notch. Hopefully it will serve to justify additional studies like this, so it’s really about building the record for the significance and meaningfulness of these types of projects.”

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