Progress 04/15/21 to 04/14/22
Outputs
Target Audience:In the first year, our target audiences included our five Fellows, the undergraduate community as a whole for recruiting a larger, and more diverse cohort in Year 2, the UConn academic community to recruit more faculty interested in sustainable community food systems and stimulate more interest in these topics within the University administration, and the communities our Fellows were serving in. Our five Fellows in 2021-22 were successful in their placements, but the continued rules restricting in-person meeting because of COVID, and the newness of the grant made recruiting and building community within the cohort a bit awkward. These Fellows were placed at two farms in central and western Connecticut, the non-profit Coogan Farm (part of the Dennison-Pequot Nature Center) in Mystic, Connecticut, the Keney Park Sustainability Project (KPSP) in Hartford, and an educational farm and the Community Licensed Cooperative Kitchen (CLiCK) in Windham County. As an audience, the Fellows are central to the educational efforts of the SCFS program and we built community through bi-weekly virtual meetings, field trips to KPSP, the Spring Valley Student Farm at UConn, and Auerfarm, and then the Sustainable Community Food Systems Seminar class in the Fall. Our second audience was the broader undergraduate community from which we were recruiting new Fellows over the course of the 2021-22 academic year. We worked with a graduate intern who was part of the Office of Service Learning Programs and an undergraduate assistant. They helped us use social media, flyers around campus, visits to relevant classes, and specific outreach to groups like the Cultural Centers and student clubs to promote the SCFS program and the summer internships we offer. We believe this outreach helped us build our largest cohort of likely SCFS minors of any year the program has been in existence. Our outreach to the academic community was designed to meet three goals: identify faculty who might want to be mentors in the program or affiliated in other ways, strengthen research ties and collaborations in the area of Sustainable Community Food Systems, and make the administration more aware of the work we are doing to help identify avenues to grow the program and make it more sustainable beyond the funding of this grant. We reached out to these audiences through a favorable article in UConn Today, the news source from University Communications (https://today.uconn.edu/2021/09/sustainability-community-and-food-theory-meets-action-for-uconn-undergrads/), outreach to individual faculty who do work in the intersecting areas related to our program, and the CLAS Interdisciplinary Research Conversation mentioned in other parts of this report. Our final audiences are the communities in Connecticut that are the focus of our work. These communities necessarily change from year to year based on the placement of our Fellows, but we believe this allows us to spread our message more broadly and build a larger network of non-profits, businesses, farms, and agencies around the state. In the 2021-22 year, we worked with farms and farmers markets in Litchfield and Middlesex counties, a non-profit farm in New London County (Mystic), the Keney Park Sustainability Project urban farm in north Hartford, and an educational farm and CLiCK in Windham County. As we add more Fellows in future years, this network will expand. One of our Fellows in Year 2 is working with a broader coalition of food-based non-profits to create a food access map for eastern Connecticut. These activities will serve to bring farms, community non-profits, schools, etc. together to make a stronger food system. Changes/Problems:We ran into the need to change a couple of aspects of our grant as the first year developed. These included personnel changes, hiring fewer Fellows than budgeted in Year 1, and adding a retreat and day-long meetings for the summer internship program. One of our co-Investigators, Julia Cartabiano, retired in Summer, 2021. Julia's role as manager of the Spring Valley Student Farm has now gone to one of our former SCFS Fellows, Jessica Larkin-Wells. Jessica is not able to take outside funding, but is very supportive of the program in her role as Farm Manager. As a result, the portion of the budget allocated to her has been re-allocated to supporting other faculty mentors involved with the program. This is one area that we didn't originally budget for, but compensating faculty mentors for their time working with our Fellows is helpful to distribute the labor of supporting so many intensive internships. Because of the quick turnaround between the receipt of the grant and the summer internship season, we were not able to hire as many interns as we had budget for in Summer, 2021. This has left some additional funds for supporting the students Fellows as described below. Our experience, and the experience of the Fellows based on the Summer, 2021 evaluations, was that the Fellows were more disconnected during COVID when in-person meetings were difficult. Based on their feedback, we decided it would be helpful to start the summer experience with a 3-day Retreat where the Fellows could build community and learn the essential aspects of the program together (previously, this had been done as a series of online workshops). We also decided to replace the bi-weekly, online meetings from Summer, 2021 with a mid-summer day to focus on education and an end-of-summer day to demonstrate the educational modules, display their summer internship results, and do a service project building garden beds at the SAND school. These changes required some funding to support food during the in-person meetings, and events during the Retreat. We will report on how all of these changes work out in Year 2. Another change that came out of student feedback is the need to support student travel when their internship sites are far from their residence or when we ask them to meet at a particular location (e.g. AuerFarm for the mid-Summer education day). All of these changes don't impact the core goals of the program and are intended to better support the Fellows in the work they are doing. We will continue to adjust the program as evaluations and our reflections bring up new ideas that will improve the program. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?As mentioned above, the first goal of the project is the training of young, food system professionals. We find that the direct, hands-on opportunities offered by the community internships are among the best ways to effectively train the Fellows. Each Fellow has unique goals and interests so placing them with a community partner that meets those needs gives them the direct experience in their area of interest makes them stronger agents in the community. We follow this personalized experience up with an academic framework that gives each Fellow context and builds their knowledge of sustainability, community food issues, and the food system as a whole. The SCFS Seminar was another place where important, professional development occurred. Working in a class setting, focused on this program, with an instructor from the world of food systems, enabled the Fellows to directly study the real-world impact of decisions being made about the food system. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?In our original proposal, we identified several communities of interest for this grant, including local communities where the Fellows do their internship, the immediate community of Windham where a number of internships occur, the community of University students, the broader UConn community, and more specific communities within UConn such as the cultural centers. In the first year, we were able to reach out to local communities through the internship projects of each individual Fellow. We also participated in the Windham Community Food Network's Eastern CT food system stakeholders meeting that occurred in April, 2022. Within UConn, we did a lot of recruiting and informational programs in various student venues from classes to clubs to learning communities to the cultural centers. We also reached out to the academic community at UConn through the Research Conversation on Sustainable Community Food Systems. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In Year 2, we will be ramping up our activities substantially. We have hired ten, new Fellows who extend our diversity in some ways (although we are still having trouble recruiting men to the program). We will be starting recruitment earlier in the fall, with the assistance of our current Fellows and a graduate assistant. We will reach out to different departments, including the Neag School of Education and Cultural Centers, to reach a broader audience. We have a large enough, critical mass of Fellows to host an event related to SCFS that will demonstrate the interesting possibilities of the program. The Fellows will also be demonstrating their work at a Fall research event and some will bring their knowledge back to the community through continued, academic year internships. Our Year 1 work has given us a lot to think about from evaluations and our program retreat where we evaluated our own needs. We have implemented a number of changes like adding the training retreat and making fewer summer meetings that are more intensive. We will continue to use feedback from the Fellows and our own self-reflection to improve the program each year. Next year (summer, 2023) will be our first year actually doing the summer program for the Youth from SAND School. We are actively developing a relationship with SAND school through the teachers we are working with and the Acting Principal. All seem eager to work with us and we are expanding our efforts beyond just the program to have Fellows helping with garden beds this Fall and some of the next cohort will sit in on classes in the Spring to start getting to know summer program participants.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Impact: Even in the first year, with short notice to recruit a cohort of Fellows for the summer, our program to create a more sustainable food system and train future food system professionals has shown significant impact on participating students, the UConn community, and communities throughout Connecticut, where Fellows were placed. We had seven major types of accomplishments in this first year: 1) Placing five Fellows with community partners and the terrific work they did in the community, 2) Working with a professional evaluator at UConn to establish the methods by which we are evaluating the program's success throughout the five years of the grant, 3) Creating a new "Sustainable Community Food Systems Seminar" class for the Fellows to integrate the Fellow's work with academic ideas and the national context of sustainability, food justice, and community action around food, 4) Recruiting a diverse and larger cohort of Fellows for Summer, 2022, 5) establishing training events for the Fellows, 6) creating a stronger support system for the Fellows, including a graduate manager, peer communications, and faculty mentors, 7) Hosting an event on sustainable community food systems for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Conversations. The heart of our program, and its greatest impact, is in the Fellows and the work they do in the community. All of our Fellows work at least five hours a week doing sustainable agriculture on farms or in community growing spaces. They also work on educational modules that will make up the 4-H summer program for Youth that begins in summer, 2023. The core of their internships is working with a community partner where they pursue any number of activities that have an impact on food access in the community. As examples, one Fellow developed educational videos for TikTok to inform young people about the methods and benefits of sustainable agriculture, while another did a survey and map of food resources in the Hartford area where food insecurity is a prominent issue. Another Fellow volunteered with the Coogan Farm in Mystic to produce fresh, sustainable produce for local food pantries while doing a senior thesis project mapping the demand of different communities in Connecticut for free school meals offered during the pandemic. Impacts 2-6 relate to getting our program established for the next four years (and hopefully beyond) in terms of effectively evaluating ourselves so we can adapt in real time, providing the Fellows with the unique educational opportunities that make this program special, and creating the infrastructure for supporting the summer Fellowship program and identifying new Fellows. The final impact of the CLAS research conversation illustrates how our program is reaching out to coordinate efforts around research about sustainable community food systems around the University and in the community. Although the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences hosted the meeting, we brought in non-profit leaders and faculty from other schools around the University, emphasizing the need to cross disciplinary and administrative boundaries to effectively solve the food security issues faced in Connecticut and beyond. Objective 1: Our activities in 2021-22 met our training objective in a number or ways, but particularly through Impacts 1 and 3 described above. The summer internship is essential to the training of a cohort of future food system leaders that is not only diverse, but also understands how diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential in building an equitable food system for both rural and urban communities. Our Fellows reported that ***Insert quote from focus group*** in our end-of summer evaluations. We were fortunate to work with Savanna-Nicole Villalba, M.A., a regional planner in northwest Connecticut with a strong background in food access (and a UConn alumna!) who taught our Fall, Sustainable Community Food Systems seminar class. We were very pleased to see the enthusiasm the Fellows had for the class and what they learned. The class even attracted a student from outside our program, from a regional campus, which helped to broaden the reach of our work to other parts of Connecticut. Objective 2: In the first year, we had a smaller cohort to work with in developing the summer 4-H program for Youth from the SAND School in North Hartford. With these Fellows, we were able to build a conceptual map for the topics to be covered during the five days of the summer program and a few viable lessons. The Fellows from the Summer, 2021 cohort also had a field trip to the Auerfarm site where the summer program will take place. As we have continued working on these programs through the year and into the Summer, 2022 cohort, we have developed a much clearer sense of the structure for the summer program and the 2022 Fellows will each be building 2-3 modules/lessons for the program. We have recruited two teachers from the SAND School to work with the Fellows on their summer program lessons to make sure they are age- and culturally-appropriate to the population of students at the SAND School. The second cohort of Fellows will meet with these teachers for two half-day workshops and some in-school time during the school year as part of the second year of this grant.
Publications
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