Progress 06/15/24 to 06/14/25

Outputs
Target Audience:Edible Schoolyard NYC (ESYNYC) works in school communities across NYC that experience poverty, diet-related illnesses, and the disproportionate effects of systemic inequities in education, food access, and health. The same equity-based criteria guided our Fellowship outreach. We advertised widely to ensure a diverse applicant pool through ESYNYC's email network, social media, LinkedIn, an NYC school garden listserv, and various committee networks we're part of. To assess interest and school commitment, applicants completed a form outlining their vision for edible education and confirming administrative support. This year, we received 63 applications for 10 Fellowship spots; more than double last year's interest. We know some applicants heard about the Fellowship through schools selected in last year's cohort, reflecting strong peer-to-peer interest and the program's growing visibility across school communities. Our selection committee, composed of ESYNYC teachers, our Director of Horticulture and Operations, and our Director of Education and Quality, reviewed all submissions. We prioritized Title 1 schools in historically disinvested neighborhoods. The ten schools selected for this year's Fellowship represent neighborhoods across Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens. Changes/Problems: There have been no major changes to our overall approach. However, one participating school was unable to attend two of the required workshops, which are a core component of the program. As a result, we are reallocating a portion of their funding to other schools that have fully participated. Schools were informed early on that full participation was required and funding could be reallocated if expectations weren't met. While we provide funding and comprehensive training, we recognize that time remains a significant barrier for some schools due to competing priorities and limited staff capacity. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project is rooted in professional development, with all core programming designed to support educators' learning and growth. Over the course of the year, we have offered hands-on workshops, site visits, and ongoing training to strengthen participants' capacity to lead edible education initiatives. Each school received $4,075 at the start and end of the year to support program implementation and professional learning. We continue to share relevant grant opportunities to help schools sustain their cooking and gardening programs beyond the fellowship period. Additionally, we provide schools with resources, including our edible education curriculum and supply lists for setting up and maintaining kitchen and garden spaces. ? How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We share results directly with participating schools so they can see their individual progress and outcomes based on their pre- and post-survey data. Our evaluation consultant analyzes pre- and post-survey data, and we provide each school with a summary of their results to inform their ongoing work. In addition to sharing data with schools, we include key findings and overall program impact in our annual report, which is distributed to our funders, donors, and broader community of supporters. These insights help us reflect on the year, guide program improvements, and demonstrate the value of our work to our wider community. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?By the end of the next reporting period, we will have completed a full analysis of data collected from both the first and second cohorts of our Fellowship. This will include a comparative review of successes, challenges, and overall impact across the two years. Findings will be shared with participating schools and to our broader network of supporters. As this is the final year of the Fellowship, the insights gathered will be especially valuable in shaping the future of our edible education work, particularly through the lens of professional development for educators. We will use the results to assess long-term sustainability and identify best practices for broader implementation. We will also continue to serve as a resource for participating schools as they maintain their edible education programs.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? GOAL 1 To date, we have conducted five of six educator workshops aimed at deepening NYC educators' knowledge of the local food system, food justice, and urban agriculture. Our last workshop will be held at the end of May. Each workshop is designed to be culturally responsive, experiential, and directly applicable to classroom and garden settings. In one session, educators worked with our Director of Horticulture to design inclusive, culturally relevant school gardens, drawing from student and community needs. Another workshop highlighted culturally responsive cooking, featuring hands-on preparation of Vietnamese summer rolls alongside a discussion of food traditions across cultures. A third focused on the garden as a space for teaching social justice: educators practiced leading garden jobs with children, like weeding and planting, while learning how to incorporate stories of Cesar Chavez and Fannie Lou Hamer to connect food to labor rights and empowerment. Our workshops emphasize student autonomy by modeling how to structure cooking and garden jobs that promote agency, collaboration, and care. We provide each school with our adaptable edible education curriculum and require at least one representative per school to attend the workshops. GOAL 2 Each participating school receives four site visits over the course of the year. Three have been completed, with the final visit, which includes an end-of-year assessment and post-survey, scheduled for May. At the start of the program, we conducted a pre-survey to understand each school's baseline in areas such as garden infrastructure, presence of a garden committee, and prior experience with gardening and cooking instruction. These insights help us tailor our support throughout the year. During site visits, our Director of Horticulture and Operations provides personalized, technical guidance based on the school's garden space and needs, while our Director of Education and Quality observes lessons and offers constructive feedback. In one school, a pollination lesson used turmeric-dusted paper flowers and bee finger puppets, which opened up opportunities to discuss ways to deepen student interaction and engagement. We've also seen creative integration of food into the school day, including a pasta primavera cooking lesson and smoothies prepared by teachers for students arriving early for before-school care. Lastly, educators have access to continued support via email throughout the year. GOAL 3 Through mandatory workshop participation, educators engage deeply with our interactive edible education curriculum, designed to integrate seed-to-table learning with core academic subjects. The workshops build toward implementation, providing educators with the skills to adapt our scope and sequence to meet their students' specific needs while reinforcing academic standards. Our scope and sequence includes five thematic bands--such as Environmental and Community Stewardship and Social-Emotional Learning--and is structured into two age groups (3-K and Pre-K), with an A/B year rotation to prevent redundancy. The third site visit will include a lesson observation conducted by our Director of Education and Quality, who will provide individualized feedback to each educator. In addition to the observation, each educator is required to submit three lesson plans by the end of the year, which will be collected by our team. These submissions, along with the observation notes, will help assess how educators are applying the scope and sequence in their classrooms and demonstrate growth in aligning edible education with core academic content. GOAL 4 This year, NYC educators have made meaningful progress implementing edible education programs in their schools. Each participating school is required to submit three original lesson plans tailored to their community's needs and classroom environments. These lessons should demonstrate creativity and thoughtful alignment with our core values, highlighting food literacy, student engagement, and hands-on learning. Our Director of Education and Quality and Director of Horticulture and Operations conducted site visits to observe implementation firsthand. We will also administer a post-assessment to educators to gather valuable data on progress and challenges. Questions focus on parent engagement, support needed, confidence in gardening and cooking skills, etc. Finally, feedback from our professional development workshops has remained a vital tool. Participants consistently report that workshops are relevant and practical, giving them the confidence and resources needed to bring edible education to life in their classrooms. GOAL 5 This year, we continued supporting NYC educators in forming committees to promote the long-term sustainability of their school-based programs. During workshops and site visits, we emphasized the importance of involving a diverse group of stakeholders--including parents, teachers, custodial staff, and administrators--to ensure broad support and shared responsibility. We provided guidance on committee roles and examples of actionable goals, such as improving cafeteria recycling systems or maintaining the school garden. One of the most interesting developments came from a participating school, where the students have an active role in running the edible education committee as part of an after-school program. This model not only empowers youth leadership but also fosters long-term engagement from the students themselves, demonstrating that students can take real ownership in sustaining garden-based education. As part of our program deliverables, each school was asked to submit a plan outlining the structure and membership of their committee. These plans help ensure that the program continues beyond our direct involvement and that school gardens remain active, cared for, and integrated into the curriculum.

Publications

Progress 06/15/23 to 06/14/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Edible Schoolyard NYC (ESYNYC) works in school communities across NYC that experience poverty, diet-related diseases, and other disproportionate effects of systemic inequities in education, food, and health access. The same criteria apply to our fellowship. We advertised our fellowship in a variety of ways to be equitable and to receive a diversified pool of applicants. We sent an email out to ESYNYC's network, posted on social media and LinkedIn, posted on an NYC school garden listserv, and sent emails to various committees we participate in. We created an application for interested participants that gauged the level of interest and school administration's support in implementing edible education by having each applicant answer a series of questions and specify their vision for edible education programming. We received 27 applications and created a committee, which included ESYNYC teachers, our Director of Horticulture and Operations, and our Director of Education and Quality to review and select the participants. All of the schools we selected are Title 1 schools in disinvested neighborhoods. The ten schools selected for the Fellowship's first cohort are located throughout the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and East Harlem. Changes/Problems:There have been no major changes thus far. We did have some schools that were unable to attend a workshop but we asked them to complete the missed assignment and sent them the PowerPoint presentation. We have also reduced the stipend for schools that missed multiple workshops and will reallocate funds to next year's schools. Next year, we plan to have clearer expectations and explicitly say there will be a financial reduction for missing multiple workshops. We encouraged each school to have more than one person in the event someone cannot attend a workshop another individual can come on behalf of the school. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?So far we have shared a list of relevant grant opportunities that our participating schools can apply for to receive additional funding for cooking and gardening with students. Further, we provided each school with a list of supplies they would need to have a functioning kitchen and garden space. We have also shared our edible education curriculum for educators to reference and adapt for their students and school communities. Lastly, we continue to share relevant workshops they can attend provided by other organizations. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The results will be disseminated in late summer. At the end of the school year, we will conduct the post-surveys. After examining our pre and post-surveys, our evaluation consultant will then sort through and analyze the data to share with our participants. We will use these findings to make recommendations and adjustments for the second year of our project. In addition to sharing our findings with our fellowship participants, Edible Schoolyard NYC will include our findings in our annual impact report which is sent to our broad base of supporters. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?By the end of the next reporting period, we will have collected and analyzed data from the first year of our program. The results will have been disseminated to our participants and shared publicly with our broad base of supporters to demonstrate the impact. We will use these findings to make any needed modifications for the second year of our program. We will also receive information on the committees each school created to ensure the edible education programming is sustained. Lastly, the second set of schools will have been selected and the workshops will have begun.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Goal 1: To date, we have conducted six workshops that have increased NYC educator's knowledge of the NYC food system, food justice, and urban agriculture enabling them to implement edible education in their respective schools. For example, one of our workshops, which was led by two of our educators, focused on collaboration and celebrating the varying cultures of NYC in an urban school garden. Every participant was assigned a garden job in which they had to work together, showcasing social-emotional learning in the garden. Then, we modeled two lessons: how rice is grown in different parts of the world and companion planting through The Three Sisters. Another workshop focused on how to create an urban school garden while making it inclusive to one's school community. Our Director of Horticulture and Operations spoke about how ESYNYC makes its gardens accessible to the community through initiatives such as open gardens and how we engage with the community and school-based staff to ensure our crops are culturally relevant to the communities we serve. Participants then engaged in various garden jobs such as potting basil that they were able to take home. Lastly, we have shared our edible education curriculum with each of the schools to either use or adapt to fit their specific schools' needs. For each workshop, we require each school to send at least one representative. Goal 2 In addition to the workshops, each school has received three site visits to date, with a fourth scheduled for the end of June. Our Director of Horticulture and Operations conducted one of the site visits, where he examined the growing spaces and gave technical support on how participants could start a garden or improve their existing one. Our Director of Education and Quality has observed lessons and given guidance on lesson instruction. We have noticed improvements since our first site visit. For example, one of the schools had garden beds that were falling apart, since they have built new beds and are full of plants. Both our Director of Horticulture and Operations and Director of Education and Quality are available via email should anyone have any questions or need support. Furthermore, we conducted a pre-survey and will conduct a post-survey at the end of the school year. In our pre-survey, we assessed various categories, such as whether the school already had an established garden, whether there was a garden committee, and whether they had any experience cooking and gardening with students. Goal 3 Through the mandatory attendance of our workshops, educators learn about and participate in our interactive edible education curriculum. The goal is that they will use our scope and sequence to adapt our lessons and create new lessons that meet the needs of their students while also making connections to the core academic curriculum. Our scope and sequence include five bands that touch upon our core competencies and themes, such as Environmental and Community Stewardship and Social-Emotional Learning. Our scope and sequence are also broken into two age groups (i.e., 3-k and pre-k), and to avoid redundancy, we have created an A/B year rotation. Additionally, our Director of Education and Quality has observed each educator teach a lesson and has provided constructive feedback. At the end of the school year, each school will have to submit three lesson plans. Goal 4 Our Director of Education and Quality has observed each school teach one lesson to see how each site is implementing edible education in a way that works best for them. For example, one educator conducted a lesson with various ingredients ranging from black beans to grapes. Students were broken into groups to pick toppings to make and write out a recipe for nachos. After creating a recipe with ingredients that might not typically go together students then had to write a paragraph on what they would change and why they thought the recipe did not work. Additionally, at the end of the year, we will receive three written lessons from each school that will also demonstrate how they plan to implement edible education programming in their own schools. Lastly, through our site visits, we are able to observe whether the gardens are being used and maintained--which they have been! Lastly, at the end of our workshops we ask participants to provide us with feedback that helps us to gauge any potential implementation barriers and if they found the workshop to be useful for how they would be implementing programming. Goal 5 In one of our workshops and during our site visits we have spoken to our participants about the importance of creating a committee of members that are dedicated to edible education to help ensure its sustainability. Having a variety of backgrounds on a school committee has proven to be beneficial for the ESYNYC team and we have advised each site on the variety of roles that could be helpful such as a teacher, custodian, parent etc. We also shared examples of the types of activities and policies a committee could accomplish such as ensuring proper recycling in school cafeterias. At the end of the school year each site will have to show us their plan for the committee and who will be on it.

Publications