Progress 09/01/21 to 08/31/23
Outputs
Target Audience:We partner with Title 1 schools (10 elementary and 1 high school) in Portland Public Schools, Centennial, Reynolds, and David Douglas school districts. We strive to prioritize the most underserved schools and offer programming that provides educational justice to students who identify with demographic groups that traditionally have been underresourced and marginalized. In our hiring decisions, we highly value staff that also reflect the lived experiences of the students we serve, including native languages,racial identity, living with a disability, idenitfying as LGBTQIA, connection to the school's neighborhoodand lived experience of economic hardship or food insecurity. Approximately 20% of our students attend Spanish-English Dual Language Immersion schools. At these schools, we offer programming to support our students from Spanish speaking households. We target the majority of our programming toward youth ages 5-18 for the purposes of this grant, but also idenitfy our students' parents and caregivers, as well as teachers and other staff at the schools where we partner as key stakeholders and recipients of many of our efforts to support Farm to School initiatives with in the school communities. The following details the Free and Reduced Lunch Rate (FRLR) as an indicator of neighborhood poverty, the percent of English Language Learners (ELL) and the percent of students of 95% RFLR, 46% ELL students, 78% BIPOC students • Whitman school 81% FRLR, 31% ELL students, 65% BIPOC students • Faubion school 74% FRLR, 18% ELL students, 73% BIPOC students • Kelley school 75% FRLR, 51% ELL students, 43% BIPOC students (About half of the whitestudents are slavic and attend the school's Russian dual language program.) • Scott school >95% FRLR, 36% ELL students, 71% BIPOC students • Davis school >95% FRLR, 53% ELL students, 79% BIPOC students • Glenfair school >95% FRLR, 42% ELL students, 80% BIPOC students • Cherry Park school 66% FRLR, 27% ELL students, 60% BIPOC students • David Douglas High School 70% FRLR, 51% ELL students, 66% BIPOC students Changes/Problems:Overall, we felt thrilled with what our school garden education and food systems education teams were able to accomplish throughout the grant period. There were three changes or challenges to the project that we'd like to acknowledge and explain. First is that while PPS Nutrition Services were happy to receive the 8 "kid-approved" recipes, their director, Whitney Ellersick shared with us that the recipes we shared were too complex for their chefs and cooks to prepare at a large scale. Since then, PPS Nutrition Services has taken on a Nutrition Services FoodCorps Service Member who provides extra capacity to their staff to be able to act as a coordinator with our cafeteria tastings and recipe development team. Moving forward we plan to hold more meetings with the FoodCorps Service Member and if possible the lead menu planner for the District, to better understand their limitations around number of ingredients, bake time, and nutritional requirements so we can plan a portion of our tastings to align with Nutrition Services parameters. Second, we under delivered on the total pounds of garden produce shared with the school communities by 345 pounds. This was in spite of our staff's best efforts. However, we were happy that we were able to over-deliver on number of produce based take home kits to families! These kits provided over 3,000 additional pounds of produce to families, and also created promotional opportunities for the farmers who we purchased from for the kits. All told, this shift was a win-win. We feel happy that when combined, we provided over double the amount of produce to the schools that we'd initially set out to provide, albeit partially via a different avenue. Third is that our High School Interns from DDHS did not produce videos we could then use with our younger students. There were two reasons for this shift in plans. The first was because an opportunity came up for more direct and in person support of incoming freshmen students. That was through assisting with the 9th Grade Counts summer course that we ended up running both summers of the grant period. During this time, the Interns were able to directly welcome and support new incoming freshmen to their school through the Food Systems course we taught. The incoming 9th graders got to learn about the opportunities present through our Food Systems programming at the high school. They got to learn basics around food production, and the local area food system. Our Interns got the opportunity for direct hands-on leadership, leading small groups of incoming 9th graders through gardening stations. Because this experience was all hands on deck for five of the eight weeks of the internship, we felt it was important to prioritize the remainder of the interns' time to get experiences that served their professional development, such as field trips to local farmers markets, orchards and affinity gardens such as the Native Gathering Garden and so that they could hear from local area food systems professionals as well. While our elementary program staff and students would like to be able to use videos from the high school students, the focus on the high school students developing strong small group leadership skills, and on having a positive influence on their own school with incoming freshmen seemed more impactful than producing videos to share with younger students. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?GG Education Team trainings: Staff trainings and retreats in January, June and August of 2023: 14 Growing Gardens staff who taught in the schools attended 6 days of workshops and gatherings as a team in order to establish a shared vision and programmatic and evaluation goals, as well as gain shared skills around best practices regarding positive behavior management, increasing student engagement, trauma informed care, and anti-racist practices as well. Within the first 6 months of employment, all staff also attend Undoing Racism, a two day workshop and training through the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond. Staff also are offered an additional $250 stipend each year to apply toward any professional development opportunity they would like to pursue. In addition, our organization prioritizes hiring individuals with rich life experiences from shared communities to those of the students we work with, even if the individual does not have high levels of traditional education. Our leadership team works to support our staff as they develop their professional work skills in order to be able to teach effectively in the formal classroom setting. Finally, our Program Director was able to attend a 12 hour management training, to better support the Youth Grow program team, called Managing to Change the World, facilitated by The Management Center. Classroom Teachers: Our staff teaches garden classes during the school day alongside the 148 classroom teachers we work with each school year. The teacher provides classroom management support and helps students find differentiated entry points to engage with the content we provide. Our staff model for the classroom teachers new teaching techniques related specifically to hands-on learning of agricultural topics. In this way the teacher and garden educator learn from one another's unique suite of strengths. University of Portland Nursing Students: During the fall of 2022, our program staff hosted eight Nursing Undergraduate students for 12 weeks as they completed a community health course. Students provide 6 hours a week of direct service and receive coaching in community based teaching and interaction. High School Student Interns and Garden Educators in Training: During grant period, 6 DDHS students had the opportunity to assist in one of the elementary afterschool garden and cooking clubs that we host at Cherry Park Elementary. The teens learned by doing, and also through intentional debriefs on each session they supported with. Webinars and virtual gatherings for the greater Farm to School community in Portland: 23 community members attended either a virtual gathering we hosted for providers of teen-based programming in the Portland Area or a 2 hour webinar training with social justice advocate, Vo Vo on Trauma Informed Care as it relates to Farm to School. Participants included teachers, informal educators, and non-profit leaders. In person training with Tahoma Peak Solutions: In August of 2023 as shared above, Growing Gardens coordinated bringing equity consultants from Tahoma Peak Solutions to share with 35 Farm and School Garden educators about Native food and plant practices in the Pacific Northwest. The training was 6 hours in length. SGCCT- This online learning experience takes anywhere from 12-18 hours to complete. Participants receive a broad overview of what it takes to create, run, effectively utilize, maintain and sustain a school garden program over time. Over 200 participants from around Oregon and the Nation took part over the two year grant period. ? How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We communicate our purpose, exciting happenings, opportunities for families and impact of our programs via regular communication and outreach efforts established by the school community as well as our organization's newsletter. These include online apps such as Peach Jar and Remind, used by the schools to reach families. Using these avenues we communicate opportunities for involvement in the garden and to share about and celebrate exciting happenings and events. At school wide events, we engage with families, collect interest sign ups and share verbally with families about what we do at the school sites and provide opportunities for family members to ask questions and offer suggestions. Growing Gardens puts out a monthly newsletter to share with the greater Portland community about program impacts and ways to be involved. In addition to utilizing these regular modes of communication, we also work to build up our own school community interest lists. We then communicate to interested parties in a variety of ways. At some of our school partner sites, the Growing Gardens educator creates a quarterly newsletter to share both program impacts and also opportunities for involvement with those on the interest list. We use pictures to bring our written word to life. We also offer communications home to families via the take home kits, where we promote local area farmers, share about the programming their child receives from us, and also opportunities to get involved via our Home Gardens Program and at the school garden. At the end of each school year, we produce an End of School Year Highlights Sheet. The target audience for this sheet is school staff. This sheet highlights program outputs and impacts as well as challenges and growth areas and goals for the next school year. We share it specifically with teachers and school administrators in particular. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Growing Gardens is proud of the impacts our direct K-12 programming, technical support for Portland-area school garden programs and our online School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training have had on over 4000 K-12 students at 12 Title 1 school sites, 40 school and community gardens and over 200 adult learners throughout the life of this grant cycle. Goal I: Students understand where food comes from and how it grows - K-5 School Day Lessons: Over the two year grant period we taught 3,669 students at 11 schools, with each student receiving an average of 16 lessons. We continued to develop lessons in Spanish, adding a third dual language immersion school (Rigler). We taught 341 students 87 agriculturally focused lessons in Spanish. We randomly selected 10 of our 4th or 5th grade classes to survey. From this survey, 65% of students shared that cooking and tasting food was their favorite part of garden class. Afterschool and Summer School: We taught 998 students in after school garden and cooking clubs (1-3 hours per week) or summer school garden enrichment classes. During listening sessions at the end of the school year, student participants shared they loved eating together, gardening and breathing in the fresh air. Increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the school community through garden produce, cafeteria taste tests, and take home kits: We harvested a total of 2,155 pounds of school garden produce which was used for taste tests, cooking demos, sent home with students, used in cafeteria tastings, and donated to school-based food pantries. We achieved our goal of 60 cafeteria tastings reaching over 4000 students each school year. We shared 8 kid-approved recipes with the Portland Public Schools Nutrition Services Director. Throughout the life of this grant, we provided 3,139 take home food kits to students and their families (salsa verde, local popcorn on the cob, apple varieties and 2 summer cooking kits: three varieties of cucumbers, and cherries-chard-cilantro). Kits highlighted local produce from over 20 local area BIPOC and women farmers. Kits gave students the chance to share what they are learning at school with their families at home. Many families we interviewed shared this was a very impactful part of our program. This is over 3 times the number of kits we'd anticipated providing! Each of these kits averaged approximately 1 pound of fresh produce, for an additional approximate 3139 pounds of fresh foods purchased locally and given to families. Family Events: During the overall reporting period, our staff participated in or hosted 61 family events. At these events we sought to gather family input, establish deeper connections, and offer resources to help families access more fresh and local agricultural goods. Families also provided us with guidance on what to grow in the gardens. Thanks to this grant, we also invested substantial time and effort in interacting with families via a survey and follow up interviews. We increased our program's visibility and for the first time formally sought parent/caregiver feedback to help guide our program direction. Local Role Models in Food and Agriculture: We facilitated real world connections to the local agricultural system for our students, 3rd-12th grade, through 25 total local farmer and food entrepreneur visits to the classroom. Some of the farms we partnered with to offer these experiences during year two of this grant included: Happiness Family Farm (an urban farm owned by African immigrants), Three Sisters Nixtamal (Mexican woman-owned business with manufacturing facility near the school), Thimbleberry Farm (a local working and educational farm non-profit), and Dilish Farm (a small family farm). Goal II: Develop Teen Leaders in food and agriculture. In the second reporting period, 70 additional high school students at David Douglas High School participated: 12 students in the 9th Grade Counts course we taught; 56 students in after school clubs (including students from the Indigenous Student Union); 2 summer interns; and 3 high school students who mentored younger students in an afterschool garden program at Cherry Park elementary. Afterschool clubs: We ran 3 after school clubs, including Garden Club, Cooking Club, and Garden Leadership Club. Activities included cooking garden-based and culturally relevant recipes, caring for the school's garden spaces, planning and planting the 2023 garden, harvesting produce for the school food pantry, and assisting at the Cherry Park after school program. Summer Programming: 9th grade counts and Food Systems Leaders Internship: In the summer program, students learned the basics of garden planning and care and explored leadership practices such as effective group management. Interns also gained experience and coaching on the importance of clear communication and dependability at the workplace. Summer interns were paid which allowed them to take advantage of an opportunity that might otherwise be inaccessible to them due to financial constraints. Interns worked in the garden, learned important environmental principles of permaculture, and explored potential college and career paths in horticulture, conservation, and environmental action. Local Role Models in Food and Agriculture: During both the school year and summer, DDHS students were introduced to food systems leaders from the community through in person visits or field trips to talk about their careers and expose students to food producers and farmers of color making a difference in the community. Examples include a visit to Cully neighborhood's Native Gathering Garden and to Peachwood Orchards where owner, Alma Gaeta shared about running the farm. During their end of internship exit interview, both 2023 interns shared their visit to Peachwood was the highlight of their experience and that while the whole experience was harder than they'd expected, they learned alot about the local food system. Interns also supported the maintenance of 7 elementary school gardens. During the summer internship, we teach a month-long gardening elective to incoming 9th graders at DDHS. In summer of 2022, one of the students started with no interest in gardening, signing up only because his mother made him. By the end of the class he was actually having a lot of fun, and during the school year, he started to attend our weekly Gardening Club meetings. When the summer came around, he applied and was accepted to our summer internship, where he helped teach the same class that got him interested in gardening in the first place. Now he is a sophomore, but he is still very enthusiastic about gardening and agriculture, and hopes to enter that field after he graduates. Goal III: Contribute to a regional and national increase in sustainable school garden programs. Throughout the overall reporting period, we supported 40 other school garden or community garden programs in the region through a variety of methods. These included: 27 one-on-one consultations, a seed give away of over 13,000 seed packets to 24 separate school gardens; a plant-give away of over 1000 plant starts for 25 school gardens (in addition to the 11 we run); hosting an online Trauma Informed Care in Farm to School webinar from Vo Vo, a social equity advocate, for 15 school garden advocates in the area; and coordination of an in person training from Tahoma Peak Solutions around the Native Plants and Foods Curriculum Portal for 4 local area Farm to School organizations (35 attendees). We also hosted the SGCCT online course (a 6 module course in partnership with Oregon State University continuing education platform) for a total of 7 total sessions offered during the grant period. Overall, there were 247 participants with 43% receiving some level of scholarship to participate, made possible by this and other grants.
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Progress 09/01/21 to 08/31/22
Outputs
Target Audience:We partner with Title 1 schools (10 elementary and 1 high school) in Portland Public Schools, Centennial, Reynolds, and David Douglas school districts. We strive to prioritize the most underserved schools. In our hiring decisions, we highly value staff that also reflect the lived experiences of the students we serve, including native languages, racial identity, connection to the neighborhood and economic experience. The following details the Free and Reduced Lunch Rate (FRLR) as an indicator of neighborhood poverty, the percent of English Language Learners (ELL) and the percent of students of color. Powell Butte school 95% FRLR ,40% ELL students 71% BIPOC students Patrick Lynch school 76% FRLR, 46% ELL students, 61% BIPOC students Lent school >95% RFLR, 46% ELL students, 78% BIPOC students Whitman school 81% FRLR, 31% ELL students, 65% BIPOC students Faubion school 74% FRLR, 18% ELL students, 73% BIPOC students Kelley school 75% FRLR, 51% ELL students, 43% BIPOC students. About half of the "white" students are slavic and attend the school's Russian dual language program. Scott school >95% FRLR, 36% ELL students, 71% BIPOC students. Davis school >95% FRLR, 53% ELL students, 79% BIPOC students Glenfair school >95% FRLR, 42% ELL students, 80% BIPOC students Cherry Park school 66% FRLR, 27% ELL students, 60% BIPOC students David Douglas 70% FRLR, 51% ELL students, 66% BIPOC students Changes/Problems:One recent challenge has been the safety of one of the school gardens. An encampment of houseless individuals has grown up along the edge of a schoolyard. Biohazards have been found in the garden, the shed was broken into and the garden educator has had threatening encounters in the garden. We are working with the principal to try and find solutions as it affects our program, and of course the larger school community in general. Because of the lasting effects of the COVID 19 pandemic, there have been fewer family-engagement opportunities at schools or community sites. Last but not least, our Business Manager is retiring out of the organization after 10 years. We are currently hiring a new Business Manager and will transfer over the billing responsibilities. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Our model is for our staff of Youth Grow educators to teach lessons, thus modeling hands-on food and garden education for the 146 classroom teachers, whose classrooms we push into. As an organization, we also emphasize professional development of our own team through bi-weekly meetings, training and other PD opportunities. For example, one staff member attended the national school garden conference in Colorado, one went to the Oregon Nutrition Conference and two participated in a multi-week STEM Equity training. We were also approached by the University of Portland nursing program, which focuses on public health. We have formed a partnership and 9 college-aged interns are currently assisting our elementary programs and building their knowledge of how food and ag-based education plays a role in public health. Our largest training we offer to the public is the School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training, described above. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?At the end of the school year, we put together fact sheets that summarize all of the accomplishments and recommendations for the leadership of each of the schools. We share our results in monthly board reports, newsletters and social media. We were also interviewed for this article in Modern Farmer: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/09/growing-gardens-portland/ What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?During the next reporting period, which coincides with the 2nd year of the grant, and the 2022-2023 school year, we are implementing all of the objectives of this grant. This year, we are ramping up our cafeteria tastings and increasing the number of high school students in after school clubs. We are also implementing a community-feedback process to gather direct authentic feedback from the parents of the students we serve. While we have robust evaluation data from teachers and students, until now we had scant feedback from parents. Over the course of the last year, we have worked with consultant Kheoshi Owens to close this gap in our evaluations. We have a survey out in the community now and will follow it with roundtable discussions with parents from 3 schools. The FASLP funding also contributed in our ability to get funds from the EPA to run a small grant program for other school gardens in the region. This year we will evaluate applications from school communities and select five for $5000 grants.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
1) Goal 1: Students understand where food comes from and how it is grown. During this reporting period, our team of educators taught 2806 K-5 students, an average of over 10 lessons per student, at 10 Title 1 schools, using school gardens. We also developed our lessons at two public schools with dual-language immersion tracks, where we taught 175 students 35 lessons in Spanish. Additionally, we taught 350 students in in-depth after school Garden Clubs (1-2 hours per week). In a roundtable evaluation at the end of the year, the majority of students said that the Garden Club changed how they think about food and eating. A majority reported that the Garden Club helped them think about their role in taking care of the environment, and described how. We also collected data on student's favorite activities (food, bugs, planting) and what they enjoy about the garden club. Themes that emerged from the open-ended questions included a feeling of motivation and freedom while being outside, the beauty of the garden spaces, and having fun with peers. Over the summer, we led 34 sessions of garden clubs to 97 students at 6 schools. We harvested over 1000lbs of produce, which was used for taste tests, cooking demos, sent home with students, used in 15 cafeteria tastings, and donated to school-based food pantries. We also created and distributed 1645 cooking kits (salsa verde, yakisoba noodles, local popcorn on the cob, apple varieties) with local produce so that students could replicate what they are learning at school with their families at home. 19 family events complemented our school day programs. We also coordinated connections between local farmers and food entrepreneurs with elementary students. At the elementary level, we had 11 presentations to elementary students from Happiness Family Farm (an urban farm owned by African immigrants), Loveletter farm (small woman-owned urban farm), Good Rain Farm (indigenous woman-owned farm), and Three Sisters Nixtamal (Mexican woman-owned business with manufacturing facility near the school). At the end of the school year, we conduct a survey of students on their favorite activities and what to change, and of teachers. Highlights from the teacher survey include: 93% of teacher agree that "Garden-based lessons help develop student's science skills" 95% of teachers agree that "Garden education is an effective way to teach students about the environment." 84% agree that "Garden-based learning enhances students' academic growth in core subjects". 95% of teachers agree that "The hands-on nature of garden lessons was effective in engaging English Language Learners" 93% of teacher agree that "Garden lessons were accessible and engaging for your students with special learning needs" 91% of teachers agree that "Lesson content and delivery engaged students of a diversity of racial and ethnic identities." 94% of teachers are interested in hosting garden lessons next year Teacher quotes include: My students love to get their hands on whatever they are learning about. It was very informative and engaging for them to get into the garden and investigate with their own eyes. Students were able to see and touch instead of just reading about it in a book. Seeing the plants grow and thrive made it more authentic. This program extremely enhanced the current curriculum that has been used in this classroom! I am so excited that we were a part of this class this year and that Carla took the time to make all my students feel valued and apart. My austic student LOVED having garden time! I feel this program is valuable because students were excited to learn in Spanish. They enjoyed the hands-on of each lesson, especially planting their own 3 sisters plants. The biggest impact was having an instructor who is very passionate about the lessons and teaching about the history of corn in Mexico.Many students connected to the stories or had background knowledge about the lessons and I would love to see it continue. Goal 2: Develop teen leaders in food and agriculture During this first year, an estimated 52 students joined after school Garden, Cooking, and/or Environmental Justice clubs, each held weekly. We also organized a Garden Leadership club in which high schoolers accompanied our staff in the elementary Garden Club/Cooking Club 8 times. Over the summer, 15 students participated in the daily program for 1 month in the high school garden. 3 paid youth interns learned about Community Food Systems by co-teaching the younger students, helping out in the elementary school gardens, and meeting community leaders. The softball coach also invited the Growing Gardens Food System Educator to teach a cooking class to the athletes to encourage them to eat more nutritious meals. Over the year, the teens interacted with an urban farmer of Syrian descent that runs Baylasan Botanicals, toured the Clackamas Community College horticulture greenhouse (and took home plants), interviewed venders at the Come Thru market (a BIPOC-focused farmers market), met the director of the Lettuce Grow program which runs horticulture programs in correctional facilities, and participated in a workshop on herbs and flowers of urban farmers of Mariquita Medicinals. At the end of the school year, and again at the end of the summer, we interview students and collect evaluation data. We tally up the student's favorite activities, recommendations for changes and overall impressions. 100% of students said they would recommend the clubs to friends. On a scale of 1-5, student responses averaged 4.2 to "I gained a new perspective on food, food systems, or the environment." and 3.6 to "I was able to build confidence in my leadership skills or social skills." In response to the question, "Do you feel that you grew your leadership skills this summer, such as leading a group, planning activities, public speaking, etc? If so, how?" all of the interns replied with an emphatic "yes!". Several students said that they were now more comfortable leading a group and were surprised by their own confidence during a visit of Nike corporate employees. Interns said they learned patience and flexibility from teaching the younger 9th graders and how to get the attention of a large group. They reported learning about "how climate affects food production and vice versa", the names of many plants and about companion planting. The quotes to the question about their overall take-aways, include: "So cool! Before this, I thought I knew everything [about plants and gardening], but actually I knew nothing.", "I learned a lot of new things, more than I thought I would to be honest." and "I learned that plants can give back to us more than I thought they could" Goal 3:Contribute to a regional and national increase in sustainable school garden programs. During this reporting period, we supported other school garden programs in the region through 17 one-on-one consultations, a plant-give away for 11 school gardens outside of the ones where we run programs, hosted an online gathering of high school garden programs, and facilitated the online Portland Farm and Garden Educators network which reaches over 800 people. We also run our School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training (SGCCT) four times. The SGCCT is an online 6-week course on the Oregon State University continuing education platform. Ninety seven people attended and with the help of FASLP we were able to offer scholarships to 35% of attendees to increase the diversity and accessibility of the course. OSU sends all participants a detailed evaluation survey at the end of each course. 84% of respondents rated the course as "Excellent" or "Very Good". The overall experience of the course, on a scale of 1-6, the mean was 5.2. In response to the question, "Do you feel more confident in establishing or sustaining a school garden program?" 89% said "yes".
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