Community Programs
Lost & Found Thrift Shop
The thrift shop serves the Hampden Community by promoting sustainable practices and redirecting usable items to new homes. The shop receives donations during operating hours. You can visit the Thrift Shop page for more information. The Lost & Found offers a voucher program for participants of the Avenue Drop-In and neighbors in need through a grant funded by Open Society Foundation to make sure that our most vulnerable neighbors have what they need and can experience a fun, dignified shopping experience in the process.
The Avenue Drop-In
Every Friday, currently from 9:30am-11:00am, Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition dispatches a team of trained professionals to provide harm reduction services for individuals in active drug use here at St. Luke's. The team offers syringe exchange, hygiene supplies, treatment referrals, Narcan training and distribution, and more. The Baltimore Health Department SPOT Team participates bi-weekly offering wound care, vaccines, hepatitus treatments, and HIV testing. The team also supports the neighborhood by surveying problem areas for discarded syringes to dispose of them properly and safely.
In addition, the drop-in program serves a hot lunch (currently takeaway).
All who participate are eligible for $25 vouchers to the Lost & Found Thrift Shop located in the church.
Hampden Garden Cooperative
The Hampden Garden Cooperative is a vision with three purposes in mind:
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foster community among neighbors
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learn sustainable practices for an urban environment
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feed each other
The vision of a Coop seeks to connect neighbors who grow their own food gardens at home or at a community garden to share the fruits of our labor with one another and those in need of free healthy produce.
Seasonal Garden Workshops
Throughout the year, the BALTIMORE FREE FARM will provide workshops on different areas of urban farming, permaculture, and sustainability to help us along the way.
Pollinator Partnership
Partnering with Hampden Elementary-Middle School #55 and the Monarch Sister Schools Program, the courtyard garden provides an open air environmental learning classroom for students at the school. The 2017-18 third grade class planted 22 pollinators including Common and Butterfly Milkweed, Brown-eyed Susans, Goldenrod, and others as they care for Monarch larvae that will inhabit the garden. Thanks to Friends of Hampden #55 for funding this joint project for the children of our community.
In 2019, in partnership with Blue Water Baltimore, Baltimore Free Farm and Hampden neighbors, we added two more rain barrels and 60 more plants to the gardens through a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust. Today the garden is robust with life, color, and all kinds of creeping things!
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