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Kids & Family

See 'Grow!' and Support Oglethorpe's Garden

A movie screening of a documentary about local farming will help benefit a community garden on Oglethorpe University's property.

The -Brookhaven community garden has a problem. Its current location on university property is slated to become part of the school's new student center--and breaking ground on the project is scheduled for later this summer.

The garden, a collaboration between Oglethorpe, , and , helps provide food for 30 needy families in the Brookhaven area and needs to be moved to a safer spot on campus, but to do that costs money.

Enter Amy Rentenbach. As Director of Finance and Controller at Oglethorpe, Rentenbach sits on the community garden committee and is part of a group called Crop Mob Atlanta. Crop Mob, which also has presences in Athens and Savannah, helps build community by bringing out volunteers to assist local farmers in doing their work.

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Rentenbach got involved in Crop Mob when she needed to find speakers for meetings of her neighborhood garden club. After following Georgia Organics on Twitter, she noticed that they would retweet things from Crop Mob.

"I thought, 'well, I grew up on a farm, working in the garden,' and I thought 'well, that would be something awesome to do,' because in Atlanta, there's not really much of an opportunity to do that," she said.

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Her involvement in Crop Mob has grown. Now she is in charge of making sure participants are fed after each successful mission by either getting local chefs to come cook in person or have food delivered for them.

With interests like these, Rentenbach wants to help the community garden survive, so she's arranged a screening of the documentary Grow! at the university on July 12 at 7 p.m. in Lupton Auditorium. Grow! is about young farmers in Georgia and this screening will feature a Q&A by its filmmaker, Anthony Masterson.

To keep the local theme going, local restaurants Farm Burger and The Little Tart Bakeshop will sell food and treats starting an hour before the screening.

The screening is free for students, faculty and staff of Oglethorpe. It's also free for the public, though a $3 donation is suggested. Click here to RSVP for tickets because space is limited.

Also, the garden already has a new, safe from future construction spot on campus.

"It's behind Goodman Hall, so it's actually a larger location and a flatter location," Rentenbach said. "We're pretty excited about that."

Now it's just a matter of getting everything moved there so the garden can continue to grow.

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