Peace From a Pallet: Fort Worth Church Turns Discarded Wood Into Faith, Food and Fellowship.
Peace From a Pallet: Fort Worth Church Turns Discarded Wood Into Faith, Food and Fellowship. CBS: https://youtu.be/1zFbKLdHgkA?is=p0-4HmyL4f-nqMAh
FORT WORTH, Texas 76104 — On a vacant lot, an old grocery pallet may not look like much. But to New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church, it represents something greater: a chance to feed families, heal neighborhoods, and grow hope.
The church’s new initiative, Peace From a Pallet, repurposes discarded wooden pallets into raised garden boxes capable of producing fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs for families across Fort Worth’s historic 76104 community.
Led by Pastor Kyev P. Tatum Sr., the project is part of a broader movement called Guns to Gardens: Loyal to the Soil, Healing from the Steel, an effort focused on reducing violence, increasing food security, and restoring communities through gardening, education, and neighborhood engagement.
Loyal to the Soil is led by Ken and P. Wade Ross of Central Texas, whose work helps advance community-based gardening, food security, and healing initiatives across the region.
“What some people see as trash, we see as treasure,” Tatum said. “Every pallet we rescue becomes an opportunity to grow food, build relationships, and create hope.”
The initiative is rooted in Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” For New Mount Rose, the scripture is both spiritual vision and practical instruction—transforming violence into productivity and despair into possibility.
A key feature of the project is an innovative garden box design created by engineer Tracy Welterlen, a member of Trinity Episcopal Church and a leader with the Guns to Gardens Tarrant County team. The pallet-based design maximizes growing space while keeping construction affordable, accessible, and easy for volunteers to replicate.
Pastor Tatum also serves as a member of the Guns to Gardens Tarrant County team, helping connect the national movement’s mission of reducing gun violence with local efforts focused on healing, food access, and community restoration.
Volunteers collect used pallets and convert them into raised garden beds that can be installed at homes, churches, schools, and community gathering spaces. The goal is simple but ambitious: build enough neighborhood gardens to increase access to healthy food while strengthening community connections.
Church leaders believe one garden box can help supply fresh produce for multiple households while teaching lessons in nutrition, stewardship, self-sufficiency, and care for creation.
The work is centered in Fort Worth’s 76104 ZIP code, an area that has long faced economic and health challenges, including food insecurity, chronic disease, trauma, and lower life expectancy.
“We’re not just growing vegetables,” Tatum said. “We’re growing healthier communities.”
The church’s healing mission extends beyond food production. Leaders acknowledge the lasting impact of gun violence, homicide, suicide, and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), all of which can affect physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
By bringing neighbors together to build, plant, harvest, and learn, organizers hope the gardens become places of restoration as much as cultivation. In the process, strangers become neighbors, neighbors become friends, and communities become stronger.
The project complements New Mount Rose’s broader mission of improving quality of life through food distribution, health initiatives, workforce development, and community partnerships. Church leaders describe the vision as moving the community from a food desert to a food forest.
As volunteers continue transforming salvaged pallets into garden boxes, the church has embraced another guiding phrase from Luke 9:62:
Hands to the Plow. Eyes on the Promise. Plow Forward.
For Tatum, the message is clear.
“Every seed is a statement,” he said. “Violence is not our future. Hope is. And sometimes hope begins with nothing more than a pallet, a handful of soil, and neighbors willing to work together.”
New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church
For more information, visit www.newmountrose.com.
Guns to Gardens. Loyal to the Soil. Heal from the Steel.
Transforming pallets into garden boxes, faith into action, pain into purpose, and empty lots into food forests—one block at a time.
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