Atlantic City, N.J. — As a lifelong Atlantic City resident, Stockton University student Sadia Mahi knows how difficult it can be to find fresh food, especially when you are Muslim and only eat halal meals.

“Atlantic City is considered a food desert. While we do have a lot of grocery stores here, sometimes it’s not always fresh food, so my family and I always have to go out of the city to find stuff,” said the senior who’s part of the university’s Engelberg Leadership Scholarship Program (ELSP).

When it came time for Mahi and the other members of her ELSP cohort to come up with a capstone project that would benefit the city and the communities around it, the lack of access to fresh, high-quality food became very apparent.

“A lot of people don’t have cars or they don’t have time to go to the market because they have young children that they can’t leave home alone,” said Betsaida Viljoint, who’s also part of the ELSP program.

Mahi, Viljoint and the third member of their cohort, Dayanara Villenueva, created Plant It Forward to introduce the community to fresh food options, including growing their own food at home or participating in one of the city’s many community gardens.

They partnered with two area nonprofits — Communities Revolutionizing Open Public Spaces (C.R.O.P.S.) and Coastal Cousins Heritage Gardens — to host a free public event on March 20, the first day of spring. The event featured a lecture on sustainability, a hands-on planting activity and the debut of a new seed library for city residents.

“The main thing that I wanted people to get from it is that there are resources that they can use to address food insecurity,” said Viljoint, a senior Liberal Studies major with a concentration in Elementary Education. “By having an interactive activity with families, it’s easier for them to see that there are people who want to help.”

During the activity, Jorge Azcona from C.R.O.P.S. provided seeds and cups to attendees and demonstrated how to plant them properly.

Atlantic City resident Gina Roche carefully planted beet seeds in her tiny biodegradable cup filled with topsoil. Roche has planted a summer garden in the city for years, but she was surprised to learn that seeds can be planted for food at other times of the year as well.

“I never thought about growing sprouts, so I’m very excited for that,” she said. “All the work that C.R.O.P.S. does is extremely inspiring to me. We don’t get out much and this is really cool to hang with young people.”

Azcona, a 2019 graduate of Stockton, was thrilled the ELSP students reached out to his organization to take part in the Plant It Forward event. He said they first connected last summer at one of the group’s farmers markets in Atlantic City.

“My passion is community programming, outreach and engagement, and my overall goal is to just give back to the community that helped raise me,” said Azcona, who’s the programming development coordinator for C.R.O.P.S. “So, seeing people who are actually passionate about helping the community, it’s always very heartwarming for me.”

The Engelberg Leadership Scholarship Program was established in 2019 through a $1 million commitment to the Stockton Foundation from Alfred Engelberg, a 1956 Atlantic City High School graduate who went on to become a successful lawyer after receiving a generous scholarship from the Avoda organization. Each year, the program covers full tuition, room, board, fees, books and other expenses for a cohort of students beginning their sophomore year.

Each cohort must create a capstone project to benefit the community, and Susan Davenport, the ELSP faculty liaison, thought Plant It Forward was a huge success.

“Attendees were diverse, multigenerational and seemed excited to learn more about growing their own food and learning about the existing community resources available to them,” she said. “The Engelberg Scholars program focuses on applying leadership principles to improving Atlantic City and the surrounding communities. The seed library and resource materials they worked together to create will have a lasting impact on our community.”

Azcona said the seed library will stay in Kesselman Hall at the Stockton Atlantic City campus for a few weeks, but eventually it will move to Fisherman’s Park in the city and be available to the community.

And for Viljoint, seeing the community’s engagement during the event made the project so much more worthwhile.

“You could hear babies crying and parents having to take them out of the room — that’s real life,” said Viljoint, who’s from Pleasantville and wants to be an elementary school teacher. “Those are the things that you’re going to see in urban communities. I love seeing that real life at our event. It felt like what it was meant to be, for the community.”

Mahi hopes that Friday’s event is just the start of something that could grow.

“In the future, I want to continue doing stuff like this so that it’s something people can keep coming back to,” she said. “I want to continue giving back to the community.”

As all three ELSP students prepare to graduate in May, they expressed their gratitude for being selected for the Engelberg program as they likely would not have been able to afford a college education without it.

“This program had me focused on school and not on finances. At one point (before Engelberg), it was either school or work,” Viljoint said. “As it’s coming to the end it’s just a really good feeling because I got to do something for the community that I’ve lived in for the past 18+ years.”

— Story by Mark Melhorn, photos by Susan Allen

More about the Engelberg Leadership Scholarship Program