(jazz piano music) The soil gets tilled, weeds picked, and compost mulch added to enhance the native dirt.

- Anybody who gardens in North Carolina knows we have a terrible clay soil.

By adding organic matter to it, you help bring up the quality of the soil.

- [Jason] It's another day at Sunset Farm in Northwest Charlotte, but the people working here at this urban garden aren't farmers, they're volunteers.

- I think the biggest thing for me is just giving back to the community.

- I've been volunteering here since last June.

- And we could not get the work done without them.

- [Jason] The volunteers are donating their time to the Park Community Development Corporation, which was formed by the nearby Park Church.

- So they are one of our biggest partners and biggest supporters, but we are our own separate entity, our own 501(c)(3), and we get to do great work.

We focus on three pillars: affordable housing, healthy living, and economic mobility.

- It is amazing that we have an organization that works on all three major things.

- [Jason] The Park Community Development Corporation.

or CDC for short, formed about seven years ago.

Its mission: create sustainable change within marginalized communities.

- And we have to balance our ambitions, which are huge, with our ability to do good work.

- [Jason] Here at the urban garden, they're growing a little bit of everything, with the eventual harvest going to those in need.

- And this is where we get to do a lot of our work under our healthy living pillar.

We have a raised bed garden, we have an urban garden.

We get to partner with some amazing people in the community to help mitigate food insecurity.

- This food goes to all kinds of organizations for seniors and folks who need fresh food to eat.

- [Jason] Last year, nearly a thousand pounds of vegetables were harvested from the garden.

- So the idea is double the growing space by next year, by 2025, increase the volunteer count, because we can only scale as much as we have resources to do so.

- And when you look at the Park CDC, it's not just gardening.

They have a lot of different functions that they do to give back to the community.

(upbeat music) - [Jason] Just down the street and around the corner sits the new Gilfield Park Apartments on Beatties Ford Road, built specifically as affordable housing for seniors 55 and over.

The 80 Unit complex is the first part of a multi-phase project to add affordable town homes and single family units to the area.

- And if you live anywhere in the great US of A, you know that affordable housing is a big deal.

It's a big problem.

- And I Googled senior housing and found out, and the first thing that came up was about Gilfield Apartments and that they were having an informational meeting the next day, so we went to it and signed up and we ended up getting an apartment at Gilfield.

- [Jason] Tying things together, sitting right next to the complex, raised beds for planting.

The idea is to teach residents how to grow their own vegetables to help create a more sustainable living.

- It's an opportunity at the apartments for us to get to know our neighbors more.

It's a real community there.

We share food with each other.

- [Jason] Park CDC also works with residents on what to look for in food labels and budgeting for meals, especially for those on a fixed income, and assisting them with personal financing and investing.

- We've been fortunate enough to partner with some amazing organizations, financial institutions that have the resources to talk about financial management, financial education, budgeting.

Not only that, but investments and stocks and home ownership.

- [Jason] With a staff of just four people, having volunteers to help achieve the Park CDC's goals is paramount.

- So we're small in number, but big in impact.

- [Jason] Volunteers like Sachie Kutu-Akoi who came to the United States from The Bahamas.

- Coming from a very small island, and it was very like, really condensed and not a lot of people.

There was a big community, and when I came to America, it was just not that much of a community.

So volunteering for me gave me a family that I didn't really have here.

- You get two aspects.

You get to learn about gardening, learn about horticulture, get back to agriculture, get your hands wet.

But there's also like a therapeutic component to it.

- [Jason] The Park CDC isn't trying to put a bandaid on one issue.

They're tackling multiple issues at the same time, hoping to help people truly change their circumstances.

- It really provides this sort of wraparound support for people.

So you get kind of all aspects of the things that you need to improve your life, right?

You get a place to live, you get access to healthy food and mental wellbeing, and then helping you with economic literacy, financial literacy, all those things really give you all the tools, give someone the tools they need to start to thrive.

- I think it's remarkable to find one organization that focuses on various parts of the community.

So providing affordable housing, providing ways to teach people in affordable housing how you can give back to the community.

So like by gardening and teaching them how to garden for themselves.

I think having the workshops, they do workshops on financial literacy, that's an entirely different avenue.

So I think finding an organization that just focuses on more than one specific thing and does a lot of things is just, I can't even describe it.

It's amazing.