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Every year The Food Project runs a Summer and Winter Institute, which are multi-day experiences that are designed to expose participants to the nuts and bolts of how we do our work.
We’ve just posted the registration form for our 2008 Winter Institute, which will be held February 7-9, 2008, at our sites in the Boston metro area. For more information, and to download the form, please see the Institute page on our website.
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Big steps forward (and one step back):
The Real Food Challenge is taking off. Our goal: re-direct $4 billion worth of college food spending towards smaller, local, organic farmers in the US and beyond. This summer, we—along with our partners, including Slow Food USA and the California Student Sustainability Coalition—formed a national Design Team. Leading up to the Sept 2008 public launch, we are defining plans, hosting two regional summits (one at Yale in November), and creating a website (late Oct). We plan to hit the ground running with at least 80 schools signed up to work towards a collective goal.
Living the change we want to see: The third class of Cadre members finished their year with a final retreat at a food sovereignty conference in Hawaii. Joining 160 youth, mostly native Hawaiians from all of the different islands, this was a more of a deep experience of cultural revival than a typical conference. We built stone walls, repaired fish ponds, planted taro (“kalo”), made a traditional pit oven, cooked pork, and hosted a fundraiser, among other things. More photos and info at: http://handsturned.tripod.com/
New Cadre class includes 3 from TFP community. TFP alums David Schwartz and Carmen Dongo join John Wang 7 other young leaders from around the country in next year’s Cadre class. There were more than 3 applicants for every spot. Decision-making was excruciating. Thanks to those who read applications and gave input. The first retreat for this group is this weekend. Almost half of the Cadre members are heavily involved in creating The Real Food Challenge. See profiles at: http://www.thefoodproject.org/blast/internal1.asp?ID=602
Reap/Sow is going to cover crop. We are suspending production this year to focus on the Real Food Challenge. The website is still up and contains a great archive of reviews, recipes, art, and other creative and fun stuff. You can always check it out at www.reapsow.org.
Closing words from one of the many chants we learned at Hawaii:
Gratitude, admiration, thanks, and love
To all who are present both seen and unseen.
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Spices of Life is a videoblog hosted by Nina Simonds, and they just posted a segment featuring The Food Project. You can watch the video right on the site, or download either the complete video (you can even get it formatted for iPods) or just the audio portion. Thanks to Nina and her team!
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Residents of the city of Boston: we want to build you a raised bed garden!
The goal of The Food Project’s Build-a-Garden program is to get more people in the city of Boston to grow their own food. We’ll build you a garden, and provide the support you will need to grow food successfully.
For more information or to apply for the program, see our Build-A-Garden webpage.
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The Food Project’s North Shore site runs several farmers’ markets including one in downtown Lynn, MA. The Project for Public Spaces highlighted that market in an article about innovative practices and farmers’ markets that operate in low-income communities.
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We are excited to announce the return of our popular winter CSA!
The winter CSA is an opportunity for you to receive healthy and delicious, locally grown produce from The Food Project twice during the holiday season. Historic Codman Barn in Lincoln will host our distribution of vegetables, herbs, fruit, and baked goods once during the week before Thanksgiving, and again during the week before Christmas.
Please see our Winter CSA page for more information and to sign up.
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Our staff and interns wrote a manual on building raised beds (PDF) which is now available for download. At 5 pages including pictures of many of the steps it’s short and sweet, and concisely takes you step-by-step through building beds of your own. Also included is a list of all the materials you’ll need, as well as prices as of Summer 2007 for many of them. Enjoy!
You can also read more about the other urban agriculture initiatives here at The Food Project.
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The posting for the Grower’s Assistant job for the 2008 farming season is now online!
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The fine folks at BzzAgent came to volunteer on our Lincoln farm a few days ago, and they have a great writeup of their day, complete with pictures. (More pictures over here.)
Thanks to BzzAgent for helping us out on the farm and then writing about the great experience they had!
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Lots of articles mentioning The Food Project have appeared in the past few weeks:
Teenagers dig in at farmers market - Boston Globe
Boston group turns to farms to fight fat problem - Reuters
Gardens in the hood - Grist
Tour De Farm - Weekly Dig
Farming the Concrete Jungle - In These Times
Growing our local food connections - Gloucester Daily Times
