Progress 08/01/11 to 07/31/13
Outputs
Target Audience: Weeksville Heritage Center is located in Central Brooklyn, specifically in the neighborhood called Crown Heights. The primary target audience for our Green Weeksville programming is the surrounding community, which is generally considered an underserved community living in a recognized "food desert." The population is overwhelmingly black at 68% with 36% being of African American descent. The median household income is just under $40,000 per year with 25% living in poverty. In terms of health issues, about 29% are obese and just under 12% suffer from diabetes. (From the Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports @ www.brooklyn.cuny.edu) Our Green Weeksville programming successfully reaches all segments of the community's general population. For example, the Farmers Market and its workshops, demos, etc, reach the general population - adults, children and seniors who come from the neighborhood, including the Kingsborough public houses and the Kingsborough Senior Center. The in-school Green Weeksville program reaches about 40 2nd graders attending PS 243, also located in Crown Heights and the approximately 14 youth participating in the youth entrepreneurship program annually live in Central Brooklyn and attend various high schools in the vicinity. Going directly into the community to promote the Farmers Market is critical to building audience. To do this, staff attended a community meeting at the Kingsborough Houses (New York City Housing Authority public housing) to promote the Farmers market. Also, we engage the youth who participate in the entrepreneurship program by sending them into the community to pass out flyers at area businesses, e.g., banks, hair and nail salons; and at community centers and churches, e.g., the Berean Baptist Church and the Berean Community and Family Life Center. They also post promotional flyers on bus stops. From a financial standpoint, we have made the Farmers Market as easy to use as possible for our community by accepting food stamps and coupons as follows: EBT, FMNP, Health Bucks and WIC Fruit and Vegetable Checks. While our primary audience for the green programs is local, WHC also draws visitors from throughout the NYC metro area. For example, during Saturdays in July WHC hosts music concerts that attract a sophisticated urban crowd with average attendance per concert ranging from approximately 700 -1,000 concert-goers. These general population visitors also enjoy the farmers market, the kitchen garden and the programming built into their presentation. And, during museum hours, general population visitors touring the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses, who include a high proportion of grade school children and teens on class trips from all over Brooklyn, are introduced to the kitchen garden and food and preservation traditions at historic Weeksville. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Yemi Amu is WHC's part-time Farmers Market Manager. She also oversees the Youth Entrepreneurship program, supervising both the youth training sessions, as well as their working participation at the Farmers Market. Eric-Michael Rodriguez is thepart-time Farm Manager. He is charged with planting and managing the Kitchen Garden, as well as introducing heirloom varieties into the garden, especially those relevant to African American traditions and he is taking the lead in creating andmanaging the seed-saving program. WHC educator, Kadrena Cunningham was responsible for managing the Green Weeksville in-school program for 2 classes of 2nd graders from PS 243. Yemi Amu and Eric-Michael Rodriguez attended thefollowing conferences: 1. Greening From the Ground Up on creating more sustainable green communities in NYC. Held at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY; 2. Brooklyn Food Coalition Conference on creating healthy food access that is equitable to all; 3. Just Food Conference on growing and distributing healthy food held in NYC; 4. Making Brooklyn Bloom on urban gardening. Held in Brooklyn; 5. Growing Power Urban and Small Farm Conference , which addressed aquaponics and aquaculture in urban spaces. Held in Milwaukee, WI; 6. Small Farm Summit, which addressed issues around developing financially sustainable farms. Held on Long Island. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Overall, from August 1, 2011 through July 31, 2013, the Green Weeskville program reached and served approximately 3,000 community members, students and visitors to WHC through the farmers market, the youth entrepreneurship program, the Green Weeksville in-school program for 2ndgraders, and through community outreach efforts. The farmers market operated on Satudays in June, July and August and served approximately 2,000 customers and visitors to the market, i.e., those who made purchases and/or participated in the programming. Based on customer surveys, feedback from our customers expressed appreciation that the market was here, i.e. close to their homes so they didn't have to travel far to buy fresh produce. The varied demonstrations and workshops increased community knowledge on a range of topics that included essential general health, nutrition and culinary information, as well as on subjects of growing interest to urbanites, such as bee keeping and canning and preserving. For example, through our partnership with Just Food, we provided a series of Canning Workshops that included the “how-to’s” of developing and maintaining a home-canning business. Aeli Gladstein, a NYC Bee-Keeper provided an urban beekeeping workshop that taught participants how to raise bees for commercial honey production. We also provided urban farming related business skills for chicken keeping and urban fish farming via aquaponics. Another important aspect of the farmers market was the recipe exchange. We received several recipes from customers and we’ve selected 10 individual recipes from this collection for the Community Cookbook. In order to better serve Weeksville’s surrounding neighborhoods, we created an Advisory council of 6 individuals from within the community including entrepreneurs, activists and educators. We conducted individual meetings with council members to gauge their interests and specific areas of expertise in strengthening the green program. All programs were designed to appeal to multiple generations from children to teens to adults to seniors. The 24 teens that participated in the 2012 and 2013 youth entrepreneurship programs played an important role in the overall program.The Youth EntrepreneurshipProgram ran for 10 weeks from early June until early August.In order to prepare them for volunteering at the market, students first participated in a Saturday training program that instructed them about sustainable food systems, community health and nutrition, and gardening, as well as basic customer service. While the market was in operation, the teens were involved in all aspects of the operation, including setting prices, determining produce to be sold, as well as providing customer service and key outreach to the local community. In addition, the students provided cooking demonstrations to the public, which highlighted nutritious, tasty and easy replicable methods of preparing the fresh produce. Because the most effective outreach in our community is person-to-person, the teens participated once a week in canvassing the neighborhood, about a 10-block radius, with promotional flyers. They had repeated interactions with community members on the street, as well as numerous local businesses and social services offices. The market and garden also increased and deepened partnerships and relationships with area organizations and businesses. For example, we partnered with the following vendors: Imani Gardens (eggs), Colson Pastries, Tees Cakes, Pavia Family Farm, and Liquid Gold Honey.J. Glebocki Farms, Brown Butter,deLifeful Juices, Jude Farms, CDSC Food Pantry, and the Weeksville Kitchen Garden. Over each season, the marketfeatured approximately 20 food demos, as well as various workshops Green Weeksville, our multidisciplinary hands-on program that teaches and helps children examine their connection to the earth and food, worked with students at PS 243. Over the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years,Green Weeskvillewas comprised of first and second gradeclasses (90 students total) from PS 243, aka The Weeksville School, and for the second year, the entire program took place on site at WHC. Each week students explored various concepts based on environmental science, nutrition and eco- literacy. Each session included a reading, activities, science experiments and spelling words. The class concluded with a closing session that included teachers, parents and WHC staff, and featured a spelling bee contest, student reflections on what they experienced and learned, and the awarding ofGreen Weeksvilleclass certificates. Highlights from the program included: All students successfully created their own container garden at WHC. With the introduction of 4 new beehives, students were introduced to the basic concepts of bee keeping and learned about the importance of bees in maintaining our food supply. Students created their own journals with the assistance of an artist instructor and recorded all of theirGreen Weeksvilleexperiences and observations into their journals. The journals helped them to work on their spelling and vocabulary. New physical activity components were added to the program. By doing the "Plant Part Dance" and "What Plants Need to Survive" dance, the students engaged in movement, stretching, breathing for the first 15 minutes of every workshop. After touring the historical houses at Weeksville, and observing homemade soaps, the students were inspired to make their own lotions using fresh herbs and edible oils. As a result, all students made homemade body butters for Mothers' Day gifts. Over the grant period, Weeksville also piloted a seed saving program that engages youth and community gardenersto preserve African American heirloom seed varieties and gardening traditions. Weeksville successfully raised $70,000 for the construction of a community seed lending library with the capacity to hold 500 varieties of rare and endangered fruits and vegetables, as well as a collection of 50 historically African American vegetable varieties. We havepartnered with DesignNYC to design and build the library. In addition, Weeksville Created a searchable database on the seed collection for public research and offered community workshop series to teach the basics of managing community seed saving project entitled, “Building and Managing Seed Libraries.” As part of the project, we also conducted two community seed saving demonstrations: one at the Bed-Alive Harvest Festival and the Making Brooklyn Bloom conference at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In addition, Weeksvilled partnered with New York Restoration Project and NYC Parks and Recreation to create a seed distribution network at local community gardens. Over the last year, Weeksville has created a new farm design, which transforms the Kitchen Garden into a 1.25-acre community farm. This effort included: new livestock and infrastructure, including four new bee hives, ten egg-laying ducks, a duck hutch, new compost bins, and a mini-hoop house for vegetable production.
Publications
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Progress 08/01/11 to 07/31/12
Outputs
OUTPUTS: Outputs for year 1 of Green Weeksville: Improving Healthy Food and Nutrition Access in Central Brooklyn include: The Farmers Market-WHC hired a part-time farmers market manager, Yemi Amu, to run the Weeksville Farmers Market and lead the Farmers Market Youth Entrepreneurship program. The market operated for 22 Saturdays from Aug 1, 2011-Oct 29, 2011 and from June 2, 2012 - July 31, 2012 from 9am-4pm. 5 vendors participated: J. Glebocki Farms, Brown Butter Brooklyn, deLifeful Juices, Jude Farms, CDSC Food Pantry, and the Weeksville Kitchen Garden. Over the season, the market featured 20 food demos, as well as workshops on: Urban Chicken Keeping, Basic Culinary Skills, Nutrition + Wellness, and Canning + Preserving. Left-over market produce was pickled and preserved or blanched and frozen and used as community give-aways at public events. A market outreach volunteer, aided by our teen assistants, proactively conducted weekly community outreach to promote the market and its programming. On a weekly basis they placed market flyers in churches, hair salons and other businesses in the neighborhood, and passed out flyers to community members. For purchases, the market accepted cash and EBT options, including Health Bucks and FMNP coupons. The 2012 Youth Entrepreneurship Program served 14 area teens through a 10-week program from June 2nd till August 4th. They trained on Wednesdays and Fridays from 3-6pm and assisted at the market on Saturdays from 8am -5pm. Training sessions taught them about operating a farmers market as a business. At the market the teens assisted the manager and implemented their own micro enterprise, the "Weeksville Smoothie Stand" that sold fresh and affordable fruit smoothies. In addition, the 12-week Green Weeksville in-school program taught 2 second-grade classes (40 students and their teachers) from PS 243 about the environment, science and nutrition. Kitchen Garden-WHC hired a p/t farm manager, Eric-Michael Rodriguez, to improve Weeksville's Kitchen Garden to make it more productive in terms of output and community education, and he inaugurated the seed-saving program. Garden improvements included: drafting and implementing a formal production farm plan to produce 8 crop successions; creating a 110-gallon compost tea brewing system for organic crop fertilization; creating a 324 cubic foot composting system for brewing compost teas and for community give-aways. He researched and acquired 277 new heirloom fruit and vegetable varieties and introduced 47 new crop varieties to the Kitchen Garden. For the pilot seed saving program for African-American heirloom varieties, he acquired 25 historic African-American crop varieties and introduced 10 of them into the Kitchen Garden. Community outreach - WHC has tentatively assembled an Advisory Board comprised of key community members involved in local community boards, urban farming and area public schools. Year 2 of the grant will focus on working with them to establish long-term goals for the community's ongoing involvement in WHC's umbrella health program, Green Weeksville. In addition, in the coming year we will expand on the recipe exchange program. PARTICIPANTS: Elissa Blount Moorhead, WHC's Director of Programming, Exhibitions and Education serves as the project's overall director. Yemi Amu is WHC's part-time Farmers Market Manager. She also oversees the Youth Entrepreneurship program, supervising both the youth training sessions, as well as their working participation at the Farmers Market. Eric-Michael Rodriguez is the part-time Farm Manager. He is charged with planting and managing the Kitchen Garden, as well as introducing heirloom varieties into the garden, especially those relevant to African American traditions and he is taking the lead in creating and managing the seed-saving program. WHC educator, Kadrena Cunningham was responsible for managing the Green Weeksville in-school program for 2 classes of 2nd graders from PS 243. Yemi Amu and Eric-Michael Rodriguez attended the following conferences: 1. Greening From the Ground Up on creating more sustainable green communities in NYC. Held at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY; 2. Brooklyn Food Coalition Conference on creating healthy food access that is equitable to all; 3. Just Food Conference on growing and distributing healthy food held in NYC; 4. Making Brooklyn Bloom on urban gardening. Held in Brooklyn; 5. Growing Power Urban and Small Farm Conference , which addressed aquaponics and aquaculture in urban spaces. Held in Milwaukee, WI; 6. Small Farm Summit, which addressed issues around developing financially sustainable farms. Held on Long Island. TARGET AUDIENCES: Weeksville Heritage Center is located in Central Brooklyn, specifically in the neighborhood called Crown Heights. The primary target audience for our Green Weeksville programming is the surrounding community, which is generally considered an underserved community living in a recognized "food desert." The population is overwhelmingly black at 68% with 36% being of African American descent. The median household income is just under $40,000 per year with 25% living in poverty. In terms of health issues, about 29% are obese and just under 12% suffer from diabetes. (From the Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports @ www.brooklyn.cuny.edu) Our Green Weeksville programming successfully reaches all segments of the community's general population. For example, the Farmers Market and its workshops, demos, etc, reach the general population - adults, children and seniors who come from the neighborhood, including the Kingsborough public houses and the Kingsborough Senior Center. The in-school Green Weeksville program reaches about 40 2nd graders attending PS 243, also located in Crown Heights and the 14 youth participating in the youth entrepreneurship program live in Central Brooklyn and attend various high schools in the vicinity. Going directly into the community to promote the Farmers Market is critical to building audience. To do this, staff attended a community meeting at the Kingsborough Houses (New York City Housing Authority public housing) to promote the Farmers market. Also, we engage the youth who participate in the entrepreneurship program by sending them into the community to pass out flyers at area businesses, e.g., banks, hair and nail salons; and at community centers and churches, e.g., the Berean Baptist Church and the Berean Community and Family Life Center. They also post promotional flyers on bus stops. From a financial standpoint, we have made the Farmers Market as easy to use as possible for our community by accepting food stamps and coupons as follows: EBT, FMNP, Health Bucks and WIC Fruit and Vegetable Checks. While our primary audience for the green programs is local, WHC also draws visitors from throughout the NYC metro area. For example, during Saturdays in July WHC hosts music concerts that attract a sophisticated urban crowd with average attendance per concert ranging from approximately 700 -1,000 concert-goers. These general population visitors also enjoy the farmers market, the kitchen garden and the programming built into their presentation. And, during museum hours, general population visitors touring the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses, who include a high proportion of grade school children and teens on class trips from all over Brooklyn, are introduced to the kitchen garden and food and preservation traditions at historic Weeksville. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Nothing significant to report during this reporting period.
Impacts
Overall, the Green Weeskville program reached and served approximately 1,500 community members, students and visitors to WHC through the farmers market, the youth entrepreneurship program, the Green Weeksville in-school program for 2nd graders, and through community outreach efforts. The farmers market served approximately 1,065 customers and visitors to the market, i.e., those who made purchases and/or participated in the programming. This is almost double previous numbers served. Based on customer surveys, feedback from our customers expressed appreciation that the market was here, i.e., close to their homes so they didn't have to travel far to buy fresh produce. The varied demonstrations and workshops increased community knowledge on a range of topics that included essential general health, nutrition and culinary information, as well as on subjects of growing interest to urbanites, such as chicken-keeping and canning and preserving. All programs were designed to appeal to multiple generations from children to teens to adults to seniors. For example, the youth entrepreneurs created a side-walk way-faring project to lead customers to the market. They used brightly colored chalk to depict carrots, which acted as foot prints. Inside the market they had prepared colorful posters that presented nutrition facts & figures and created a backdrop for the workshops, demos and tastings featured at the market. The 14 teens who participated in the youth entrepreneurship program played an important role in the overall program. Because the most effective outreach in our community is person-to-person, they participated once a week in canvassing the neighborhood, about a 10-block radius, with promotional flyers. They had repeated interactions with community members on the street, as well as numerous local businesses and social services offices. The market and garden also increased and deepened partnerships and relationships with area organizations to enhance sustainability and grow the program, helping the organization integrate the program more deeply into the community. For example, the partnership with Just Food included conducting animal husbandry workshops; a Just Food chef also worked with the youth entrepreneurs to train them and supervise them for presenting food demonstrations at the market. A partnership with NY Restoration Project has provided garden workers. Throughout the year, the staff deepened their knowledge in the green space, as well as their relationships in the field through participation in a number of professional events, including conferences: Growing Power in Milwaukee, Just Food in NYC, Brooklyn Food Coalition, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's "Making Brooklyn Bloom, and the Greenthumb conference presented by the NYC Parks and Recreation Office. In addition, we gave back to the community through presentation of workshops, such as one on urban farming entrepreneurship at Just Food conference on "Planning an Economically Sustainable Food Justice Garden Project."
Publications
- No publications reported this period
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