About Our Volunteers

Our volunteers are all ages and come from all walks of life. They come from all over the shoreline—as far east as Niantic, as far west as Clinton, and as far north as Haddam. A good number of our volunteers are newly retired people who want something meaningful to do with their time, but we also have girl scouts, teens, and full-time workers who volunteer with us on the weekends. Twice a year, we have sailors from the Navy Submarine School in Groton come and help us with some of the ‘heavy lifting,’ such as shoveling mountains of compost, replacing blueberry netting, or taking the garden down at the end of the growing season.

Our volunteers have varying levels of gardening knowledge. Some have the 'gardener gene' and have been gardening since childhood, others have never gardened before, and most fall somewhere in between. Regardless of experience, people come to the Common Good Gardens to be part of a community that helps those in need.

Ways to Contribute

We garden on the days that correspond with the Shoreline Soup Kitchen pantry schedules: 
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings from 8:00 to 11:00 am. 
We have always had a “come when you can, do what you can” philosophy, and that flexibility is still part of our garden culture.

​There are many ways to contribute, and these types of positions are the backbone of our success.

• Be a gardener - Prepare beds, plant seeds, weed, water, harvest, remove pests, build fences, mow paths, weigh vegetables, research recipes, and turn the compost. 
• Pick up produce at farm stands - Pick up day-old produce at farm stands to deliver to pantries.

• Deliver produce to pantries - Deliver our produce and produce from the farm stands to the Shoreline Soup Kitchen Pantries in Old Saybrook, Niantic, and Old Lyme.

• Donate excess vegetables - Bring excess produce from your own garden to ours and we will deliver it to the pantries.

• Recruit volunteers - Help rally friends, neighbors, relatives, and parishioners to garden a few hours each week during the summer.

• Encourage service projects - Spread the word to your teenage child or grandchild about the possibility of having a service project in our garden. We can provide supervision as well as a recommendation if appropriate. 

• Help develop and maintain our website - You can contribute articles about gardening topics or suggest ways to enhance our website or social media presence. 

• Help us fundraise - Help us defray our costs by establishing connections to local communities, leading to donations and contributions to the garden.
• Help with administrative tasks – Keep track of our expenses, our harvests, and our volunteers by creating and maintaining records.