Our students have been hard at work this spring to beautify the outdoor space for our neighbors at Paige Academy. Learn more about this unique organization and see photos of the projects below!

In 1970 Dr. Angela Paige Cook and Reverend Joe Cook opened Paige Academy- an independent, non-profit alternative educational institution. The school was created to provide young children in Boston’s inner city neighborhoods with an education that engaged them in a creative, nurturing, culturally enriching and self-affirming manner. Paige Academy offers a unique educational experience that welcomes all children in Boston’s multi-racial population with an emphasis on supporting African-American communities that have historically been impacted by the traumas of enslavement, economic depression, and discrimination.

Paige Academy’s beautiful campus in the heart of Roxbury features three Victorian houses, garden plots and fruit orchards, fish pond, playgrounds, a chicken coop, and compost area. Over the decades Paige Academy transformed several blighted properties through love and perseverance into an educational sanctuary. In the 1970s, when banks were redlining lending inner city neighborhoods by refusing to loan them money Paige Academy raised $10,000 in pennies to build the neighborhood’s first playground.

Gardening and food justice have been integral to the program from the start. “This school was one of the urban gardening pioneers in the Boston area,” says Development Director and Gardener Keith Clougherty. “The neighborhood turned many empty lots into beautiful gardens without any resources, grants, or funding from anybody. They planted fruit trees and grape arbors that have been a part of the school from the beginning.”

These gardens became more than a valuable food source — they were also a form of activism and a way for residents to reclaim their space during a time when the area faced economic despair. As properties were abandoned and burned down, Paige Academy and other neighbors painstakingly converted vacant land into lush gardens that still thrive today.

Preschool and elementary students get hands-on time in the garden and take cooking classes as part of the curriculum. They grow a robust variety of vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, and perennials. With help from a recent Whole Kids Foundation grant, the school purchased two rain water collection barrels for irrigation and some canning equipment for making jelly from their grape harvest.

Paige Academy was founded during the bussing crisis in Boston where African-American children were being bussed to white schools under a barrage of racial epitaphs and rocks. Paige Academy was created to provide the best educational opportunities for inner-city children right in their own neighborhood in order to break the cycle of poverty through holistic, cultural education and quality employment in the neighborhood.

Today, Paige Academy provides education and care for 120 children beginning at 3 weeks through the sixth grade, after school, as well as Summer programs. Paige Academy provides a holistic, age appropriate curriculum that stimulates the intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development of the child. Their child-centered curriculum allows children the freedom to master skills in reading, writing, and STEM in addition to classes in music (African drumming, folk, jazz, and free-form drumming), visual art, theater, gardening and cooking classes, yoga, robotics, computer coding, physics, Native American crafts, and Civil Rights history.

“The space where our grapes grow today was once a burned-out vacant lot,” Clougherty says. Now it serves as an outdoor learning space where kids are taught how to harvest the grapes. Then they take them inside to wash, squeeze, and strain them through cheesecloth. Next, students use scales to weigh out the right quantities of fruit, sugar, and other ingredients for the jelly. The school chef steps in to demonstrate water bath canning for the students. When it’s all done, the kids proudly sell their product to raise funds for the school.

“It’s a lesson in science, economics, math, entrepreneurship, and even social studies,” Clougherty says. “The students get the idea they can take what they’re learning and turn that into a livelihood.”

YBB loves to give back to this amazing organization after everything they have done for our community! We’ve been partnering with Paige for decades to help improve our neighborhood while providing construction training opportunities for the young people in our programs. Over the years YBB students, staff, and volunteers have improved Paige Academy’s buildings and grounds through painting projects, landscaping and irrigation work, and small-scale building projects. This spring’s projects include a new property fence, large shed building, and children’s furniture. Be sure to check out the project galleries above to see the completed work!

Thank you, Paige Academy for all you’ve done for our community for more than 50 years. We hope our partnership continues to flourish for years to come.

Note: Content for this article was borrowed from the following sources: https://www.wholekidsfoundation.org/stories/paige_academy, https://ifundwomen.com/projects/paige-academy