28 Oct Bayer USA Foundation Awards $20,000 Grant to Powell Gardens

Powell Gardens recently received a grant for $20,000 from the Bayer USA Foundation to support the scaling of its multi-visit curricular STEM education program, Plants Matter!, for fifth-grade students.

Funds from the Bayer USA Foundation will support curriculum development, volunteer training, and program delivery, including a portion of classroom supplies and program staff salaries.

Plants Matter! provides an in-depth experience at Powell Gardens to support classroom teachers as they teach fifth-grade level Missouri Learning Standards for science. Students will benefit from three sessions taught by Powell Gardens staff onsite and in their classroom with up to twelve hours of teaching through hands-on lessons and complementary pre- and post-visit resources.  During the 2020-21 school year, the Plants Matter! program will serve 13 fifth grade classrooms: nine in Independence and four in Raytown. Powell Gardens expects to serve 280 students through this second-year expansion, an increase of 100 students compared to the 2019-20 pilot. Many of these low-income students will likely have never been to Powell Gardens, or any kind of botanical garden, prior to this experience. This program aims to deeply impact students’ immersion in the outdoors through this multi-visit program.

Powell Gardens is a Kansas City treasure with 970 acres of natural beauty less than an hour from downtown. In 1948, George E. Powell, Sr., a prominent Kansas City businessman and future owner of Yellow Transit Freight Lines (now YRC Worldwide), acquired a tract of land that was once a working dairy farm. Mr. Powell donated the 640-acre farm to the Kansas City Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America in 1969 and the land was used as a regional camp for over a decade. In 1984, the Powell Family Foundation began developing a horticultural and natural resource facility called Powell Center in partnership with the University of Missouri’s School of Agriculture. An environmental planning and design firm recognized that the site was ideal for development as a botanical garden. In 1988, official ties with the University of Missouri ended and Powell Gardens Inc., a not-for-profit organization, was established.