While she was hospitalized with serious kidney disease, Catherine Sneed picked up a copy of Grapes of Wrath. The basic message of the book profoundly changed her outlook: People feel hopeful when they have a connection to the land. When she returned to her job as a counselor at the San Francisco County Jail, she convinced officials to let prisoners do some gardening on prison grounds. The result was The Garden Project, which allowed inmates to grow food for their own use, and to give away to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and individuals in need. The success of the program has moved several individuals to donate additional plots of land in downtown San Francisco to be used to grow food. The program not only teaches prisoners gardening skills while they are in jail, but more importantly, provides them with employment upon release. More than 2,500 individuals have been thus employed - working in community gardens, schoolyards, and planting trees and flowers in San Francisco. The program has been so successful, it is being replicated in dozens of American cities. Anthony Travis, Jr., a former prisoner and now one of the supervisors with the Garden Project summed it up when he said, "Catherine Sneed is a great person. She helped me get on my feet and gave me a chance to sprout and grow. If it wasn't for her I wouldn't have a job, and I would probably be back in jail. Her program works. We don't only grow flowers and trees, we grow people."
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