Cultivating Community in City Schoolyard Gardens

Our City Schoolyard Gardens team welcomed back students in the month of September. We are currently down one staff member, with a hiring process underway. This year we are looking to expand our program to increase community participation in the schoolyard gardens. We are working to increase production levels at the schools and were able to hand out fresh vegetables to 45 people at the school sites. We are also having staff attend regular Parent Teacher Organization meetings at each elementary school site so that we can expand and deepen our relationships with parents. We are hosting regular monthly families in the garden workdays for families to come out and volunteer where their children go to school. This builds on our existing program, where during the month of September we engaged students in garden education and exposed them to seasonal snacks. Our team held 39 lessons in the schoolyard gardens, which reached a total of 564 students. The harvest of the month snack for September was cherry tomatoes. Volunteers distributed 27 cases of tomatoes to 1,900 students across Charlottesville city schools.

Our 6-week summer internship program was loaded with educational and experiential learning opportunities for our high school students. This summer included two collaborations with other youth programs which gave the young people an engaged experience. The Cultivate internship had 9 high school aged participations and 1 returning college-age counselor. As part of this grant, our young people partnered with 15 youth leaders from Piedmont Housing Alliance's Kindlewood housing community, to engage the community on environmental sustainability. Together, youth from both programs worked in our gardens, attended environmental education workshops, conducted food access asset mapping activities, and worked to develop a workshop for the community. Youth met and planned a workshop focusing on waste reduction and recycling that was presented to community members during one of our community market days at Kindlewood.

Youth came together multiple times to learn, plan, and coordinate for the workshop. This included working in garden spaces together. Cultivate staff lead a presentation on environmental justice issues which also included a workshop on food access asset mapping. Interns met to brainstorm possible topics to focus on as well as to finalize the plan and practice their workshop before presenting to the community. Finally, the youth co-led the recylcing activity to the community during our market day produce distribution.

As part of a grant from Virgina Humanities, our interns also partnered with Lighthouse Studios to create a documentary film on local Black foodways in Charlottesville. Our interns conducted research, identified local leaders, created interview questions, and conducted on-camera interviews with 5 experts in local food systems. Three youth interns with Lighthouse Studios filmed and edited the interviews into a short film which we will be showing at a screening event in the winter.

• Food Justice Interns (PDF)