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The Food Project is excited to announce its new consulting services.
If your organization is ready to invest in its growth and development, consider hiring The Food Project for a customized consulting session.
We can help you:
Build Youth Programs
Design and Run a Youth Conference
Bridge Diverse Communities of Youth and Adults
Design Agriculture and Food Systems Curriculum
Use Youth and Adult Volunteers in Sustainable Agriculture
Run a Healthy, Mission-Based Organization
Develop Leadership and Public Speaking Skills in Youth
Please contact us to request more information, or to arrange a free intial consultation to determine whether The Food Project’s services are right for you.
E-mail Greg Gale, Director of Training and Diversity, at ggale@thefoodproject.org.
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We are delighted to announce Margaret Williams as the new Executive Director of The Food Project. With over fifteen years in non-profit experience, including leadership positions at ReadBoston and Thompson Island Outward Bound, Margaret brings a wealth of experience in organizational growth, strategy, and fundraising.
Earlier today, while thinking about her new responsibility that begins on Monday, Margaret shared:
“The Food Project has always been ahead of its time, recognizing the power of youth working together to produce social good through sustainable agriculture. The challenge now is twofold: to ensure The Food Project continues to affect measurable change within our own communities while also remaining in the vanguard of what has become a national movement. I look forward to helping The Food Project achieve its ground-breaking vision both locally and nationally.”
The Board of Trustees, the Search Committee, and staff are excited by the leadership and energy she brings to the organization and appreciate your continued support during our executive transition and into our next phase of leadership.
We would like to thank Search Committee members for their hard work and commitment over the last year and in particular Josh Solomon, chair of the Search Committee. In addition, we would like to recognize Susan MacDougall for her exceptional leadership as Interim Executive Director. All of us at The Food Project look forward to having you meet Margaret in the near future.
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This summer Urban Education and Outreach Interns and supervisors wrote collective
poems about metaphors for their connection to the land at the Urban
Learning Farm. Below you’ll find their poems. They also painted the shed
at the Urban Learning Farm, putting the poems on the shed. Collective poems are when a group of people does a free-write exercise, they then choose phrases that they like and a poem is created using those selected phrases and words.
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Just Like Bees
Just like bees,
we create honey from the sweat of 100 degree days.
We build our hive rectangular,
greater than the sum of its parts.
Neither the land nor the bees can live
without one another.
We are bees pollinating
stories of gardens from Roxbury to Scotland.
It takes a group effort.
We create a beautiful bond with each other
As we work.
Bees work together, creating life,
Enriching the local community past its boundaries.
Inducing better appreciation
for our daily bread and knowledge.
Land of Presence
Land of presence
transformed from a weedy patch.
Arduous effort, planning,
perspiring, and working towards ideals.
Painting the future of growth.
Murals had to grow up quickly;
Documenting my life and the lives of others.
Driving by, everybody’s looking.
You don’t need a degree in agriculture
To experience the profound power of
Growing food.
One sole finished product
Reflects the community.
Whether a garden or a mural
Both teach without requiring previous knowledge,
a billboard advertising unique perspectives.
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The Food Project’s rooftop garden is on top of a Boston Medical Center building. This is one in a series of stories describing the challenges and benefits of farming four stories up.
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On Tuesday mornings I had the pleasure of taking volunteers or youth up to the roof to harvest, weed, and do general maintenance. I joined the team towards the end of the season, taking over for Rowan. When I think back to my time on the roof, one word immediately comes to mind: tomatoes. This year we had a ridiculous amount of tomatoes – so many that we didn’t have enough crates to harvest them all. It was a constant race to keep up with the tomatoes. The good news was that we could snack while working, and let me tell you those tomatoes were quite tasty. We also had fun throwing the rotten ones into the compost. Now I don’t know what it is about rotten tomatoes, but they are very conducive to throwing and everyone seems to have an irresistible urge to do so. At least we had an excuse.
I also think of a man named Bob. No, not Bob our former Farmers’ Market Manager. But Bob the Boston Medical Center employee who came out on the roof virtually every Tuesday to buy produce from us. Super friendly guy, very talkative and always really appreciative for the fresh produce. “Whatda we have today?” he’d ask, with a thick Boston accent of course, even though he knew exactly what we were growing and bought exactly the same thing every time (a few peppers, a couple tomatoes and an occasional eggplant). He’d get a real kick out of finding his own produce (“Ah! Look at that beauty!”), so I’d leave some ripe ones on the plant if I could.
The season ended up being a huge success - we grew a total of 2,600 pounds, four times as much as last year and a new record! We also used 120 crates of compost at the end, which was a feat in and of itself. Imagine shopping carts piled high with compost being taken up 4 floors in an elevator (in a medical center) and then being pushed through the hallways out to the roof – not an easy task! Needless to say it was a strange sight, but tons of fun. Even more exciting, though, is that our urban grower, Danielle Andrews received second place in Mayor Menino’s Garden contest in the community service category. The award honors gardeners who have improved the city with their projects. Congrats Danielle!
Starting in late January, we’ll be working with our Academic Year Program, the DIRT crew, to develop a plan for the rooftop garden to ensure its success and hopefully surpass our totals from this year.
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For me, it’s the end of an era. After 3 1/2 years at The Food Project, I am leaving in February for new adventures. My days are filled with reflective activities – evaluating 2007 programs, writing up curriculum I used with interns in 2006, putting together a manual on how to run the Cadre program. Over the course of my time here, I have watched interns graduate, staff come and go, and seasons change on the farm. One of the most exciting things this year has been to see the first full season of the Urban Learning Farm pass.
The season on our new piece of land didn’t go exactly according to plan. We didn’t start planting until June, we spent the first day of the summer moving compost and topsoil as sweat drenched our t-shirts in the 100°F heat, and we gave our first workshop with no tent, table or chairs, but I still consider the first year a success. The Urban Ed interns worked with camp groups on Tuesdays throughout the summer, honing their skills at leading 8-18 year olds in different tasks, like building raised beds and harvesting basil, and developed a new version of our popular Food Choices workshop that was more appropriate for younger kids. We hosted 4 classes from nearby elementary schools every week in the fall, in which 4th graders raced to taste radishes and carrots right from the ground. We roofed our compost bin and painted a mural on our shed, and got a tent for the workshops. I have so many ideas for making things run more smoothly next year - and when I looked out at the Urban Learning Farm under snow this week, it was a chance to take stock in everything that has already gone right.
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This year we built two raised bed gardens for the Home for Little Wanderers as part of our Build-a-Garden program. Over the course of the season, interns helped build the beds, worked with the kids to plant them, and then the kids harvested vegetables and cooked them for dinner.
We just went to the Home for Little Wanderers this morning, and Addie led a discussion with the kids there about what they liked about the garden this year and what they’d like to change for next year. Favorites included cherry tomatoes and beets. Afterwards, we gave them a big bag of popcorn (each year, the Lincoln farmers give us popcorn, and the Lincoln Kindergarteners take it off the cob, and then we give all the kernels to Home for Little Wanderers). The kids all waited super patiently, anticipating the popcorn popping. They watched through the glass-topped pot as it finally started to pop. As the popping sped up, one of them said:
“It’s like independence day! It’s going for the grand finale!”
