What Makes Me Become We?: Q3. How can people work together to overcome the challenges of meeting their needs and wants?

A Fruit Farm in a City 

Breanne Heath had a big idea. She wanted to start a garden in Chicago.

Chicago is a big city. There is not a lot of land for gardens. Still, Breanne found the perfect patch of dirt. Now she has a small farm. She calls it The Pie Patch.

Brienne works with an organization named Su Casa that helps women and children. Su Casa helps Breanne take care of the garden, and, in return, the organization gets to keep some of the food.

The Pie Patch is a place where people can pick and buy fruits and vegetables. Brienne wanted to make it easy and inexpensive for people in Chicago to find fresh, healthy food. Many people live in Chicago. There are not a lot of places to buy healthy food there. The garden helps.

A Playground Problem

Let’s say your town wants to build a playground. However, the town has only a small amount of money to spend.

People are chosen to design and build the playground. They know they must keep costs low. The design team decides to save money by reusing materials. The team will use old tires to make swings. The designers will recycle plastic bottles and milk jugs to make rides. Someone suggests building play tunnels out of old plastic tubes.

Those ideas will save money. The ideas will also help the earth by not making more trash.

The team builds a model using recycled materials. The designers bring their model to the town leaders. The leaders look it over. They ask lots of questions. The leaders ask for some changes, but they like what they see.

Soon, the playground is built. The community is happy to have worked together to design a fun, affordable playground using recycled materials.

©2015 ReadWorks®, Inc. All rights reserved. By Rachelle Kreisman http://www.readworks.org/passages/playground-problem Adapted by del Villar and Rowell 2019.

Alex's Lemonade Stand

Alexandra "Alex" Scott was born in Connecticut in 1996, the second of four children. Shortly before her first birthday, Alex was diagnosed with a type of cancer.

Within a few years her cancer had gotten worse. Alex went back into the hospital for treatment, and told her mother, "When I get out of the hospital I want to have a lemonade stand." She said she wanted to give the money to doctors to allow them to "help other kids, like they helped me." When she felt better, she held her first lemonade stand with the help of her older brother and raised an amazing $2,000 for her hospital.

While bravely battling her own sickness, Alex and her family continued to hold yearly lemonade stands in her front yard to benefit childhood cancer research. News spread of the remarkable child dedicated to helping other children with cancer. People from all over the world, moved by her story, held their own lemonade stands and donated the proceeds to Alex and her cause. Now there is a organization called the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation dedicated to fighting cancer in the US and Canada. The Foundation helps children and their families and it does cancer research to find a cure for the disease . The Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation has raised over a million and a half dollars since it began.

Adapted by del Villar and Rowell from www.alexslemonade.org.