We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alex and Shené Scott. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alex and Shené below.

Alright, Alex and Shené thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’re complete cheeseballs and so we love asking folks to share the most heartwarming moment from their career – do you have a touching moment you can share with us?

While working at one of our gardens, a parent and child stopped by. The child had previously visited the garden during summer school and learned about the “rub and smell” herbs that were growing there. The mom dropped off an older sibling at the nearby family center in the morning and the child told the mom that she wanted to go to the garden. That turned into an everyday occurrence, after drop off, so that the child could rub and smell her favorite herb, rosemary. The mom explained that the child had difficulties with sensory processing and because visiting the garden had such a positive effect, she was going to grow a sensory garden for her at home.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In 2001, we committed our time and energy to serving our communities in youth ministry, as a firefighter, and as a teacher. Due to our passion to help others and the life-altering events we experienced performing our career responsibilities, we focused our attention on volunteering to assist those individuals and families we met.

After experiencing some obstacles within our family, we felt a strong desire to do more and share what we had learned through our life changes. The desire to help others on a larger scale brought about the inception of Vine Branch Fellowship in 2019. With the help of friends, family, and relationships established over 20 years, we have been helping others. Vine Branch Fellowship was created to focus on fellowship, promoting healthy lifestyles, charitable giving, and education programs in the local and surrounding communities.

VBF designs programs to equip individuals, families, seniors, and low-income groups with the tools to create healthier food options. We seek to combat the growing concerns of diabetes, celiac, obesity, depression, and other chronic health illnesses. VBF creates opportunities with a centralized focus of connecting individuals and/or families with opportunities to assist those in need, through installing school and community gardens, nutrition classes, education, and volunteering.

VBF strives to connect the VINE of resources in communities to a BRANCH of individuals in need of assistance through FELLOWSHIP opportunities.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

We believe that patience and being able to pivot have been important. At times, we may think or feel that we have the perfect plan, but things do not always go as envisioned. Being able to constantly rethink and revise our plans has been extremely important. Having an open mind and communicating with numerous people has allowed us to incorporate different ideas and adjust our plans, ultimately making them better.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

The key to managing a team and maintaining high morale is actually treating your team as team members, not your workers. Within every team, members have a role. Their role is attached to their purpose on the team. Assisting each member with understanding their role, providing them the resources or support to fulfill their responsibilities attached to that role, communicates to each individual that they are a part of the team and the role they play is vital to overall goals and objectives. The understanding that their is no team without members orchestrating within their respective roles, helps maintain morale.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vinebranchfellowship.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vbfgardening4community/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VBFGardening4Community/