The Intervale Center’s
Healthy City
Connecting Youth with Farming
and Their Local Food System
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VOLUNTEER WITH US! Read about 2008 volunteer opportunities with Healthy City!
Overview
We all need to eat. What we eat and how we get our food are critical issues facing low-income populations. Building a sustainable, local and regional food system that ensures access to affordable, nutritious food for all people at all times is at the heart of the Intervale Center’s work. Because of its location in the farming enclave of the Intervale, and its close proximity to the urban center of Burlington, the Intervale Center has a unique opportunity to connect Intervale farmers with low-income community members through a variety of approaches. Healthy City administers a hands-on youth entrepreneurship farm and a food gleaning and distribution network. Healthy City is also developing a lead role in a community project in the Old North End of Burlington.
View a copy of our latest newsletter here!
For more information about Healthy City’s youth farm or food distribution projects, contact Jenn McGowan or at 660 0440, ext 104.
GOALS
Healthy City’s goals are:
- To provide an alternative learning environment, skills training and paid summer work for area youth;
- To increase reliable access to locally produced fresh food, especially in schools and under-served populations in Burlington, Vermont;
- To foster connections between youth, the land and the community.
YOUTH FARM
Connecting kids to the larger community is a prerequisite for developing a sense of value, place and ultimately civic responsibility. Healthy City is a farming intensive program that teaches at-risk youth to grow and market produce. Youth ages 14 and up are involved in all aspects of successfully operating a small business, from ordering seeds and planting, to writing a business plan and creating a farm stand. Throughout the summer, youth are paid for their labor, and feed their families and under-served communities with fresh nutritious food. Each teen works 20 hours a week and is paid for their time. The teens work 5 days working on the farm and at local markets. Each week includes workshops consistent with a theme for the week. Ultimately the program prepares youth for future employment and offers kids a meaningful connection to their community.
Healthy City began as a pilot program in 2002. It was highly successful at engaging, mentoring, educating and motivating youth at many different levels. As the growing season matures, so do the youth, having created their own business, learned the fundamentals of holding a job, showing up for work on time, and being rewarded with wages. Over time they develop a commitment to the program, their teachers, the Intervale community of farmers, and most importantly to each other. They gain working knowledge of sustainable agriculture, its benefits to the local food system, and their own health. Healthy City is expanding its farm acreage, along with its outreach to more youth and will become a year-round growing program when a winter greenhouse is built at the Intervale.
GLEANING & FOOD DISTRIBUTION
The Old North End is an ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse area located in Burlington, Vermont. It comprises the older residential and commercial areas of the city which face many challenges to growth, including high poverty and unemployment rates. Low-income earners, refugees, the elderly and the homebound who reside in The Old North End lack the financial means to purchase and access nutritious food. As a result they suffer from hunger, poor nutrition and a variety of health problems.
Each year, Healthy City coordinates a food gleaning program at Intervale farms that donates 30,000 pounds of fresh organic produce to over twenty social service agencies that serve thousands of Burlington residents. Volunteers and Healthy City youth work side by side to glean extra produce from harvested fields of farmers and distribute it. Agencies include the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf, Women Helping Battered Women, Vermont Cares Refugee Resettlement Program, and many others.
CONNECTING KIDS AND FARMS
The Intervale participates with local partners in a collaborative effort to help teachers develop food-based curricula that uses food, farms, and nutrition to meet the Vermont Framework of Standards. Each year, VT-FEED works with schools to build connections between classrooms, the cafeteria, school gardens, local farms and the community. Partners include Food Works, NOFA-VT, Shelburne Farms as well as the Burlington Legacy Project, Burlington School District, the Intervale, Sustainable Schools Project and the University of Vermont.
With these same partners Healthy City is part of the Burlington School Food Project, a three year collaborative effort to connect school children and their families with nearby farms by bringing more fresh local foods to cafeterias and more kids to farms for hands-on agricultural experiences. Through this food project with the schools Healthy City sold 900 pints of cherry tomatoes last fall to the school cafeterias and transformed 15 garbage bags of basil into 25 gallons of pesto for Burlington’s school cafeterias. The basil was gleaned from the Intervale Community Farm by a group of local second and third graders. This year Healthy City will expand the number of crops sold to the schools and will include items such as kale, green beans and broccoli, all grown by local youth.
These efforts have helped increase the use of fresh, locally grown produce in school lunches and exposed more Burlington youth to the nutritional and environmental benefits of organic farming and healthy food choices.
OLD NORTH END COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
The Intervale Community Connections project seeks to improve connections between Burlington’s Old North End (ONE) and the Intervale through increased coordination, education and civic engagement among ONE residents, neighborhood groups, social service organizations and the Intervale. The Connections Project has launched a “Harvest of the Month” project with the Boys and Girls Club of Burlington, Roosevelt Park Summer Food Program, The Champlain Senior Center, City Market and the H.O. Wheeler Farmers’ Market. This project features a seasonal vegetable each month and compiles activities and recipes for use by the participating organizations.
Read " A Tale of Two Carrots" an informative piece about the benefits of eating local.
View our latest Harvest of the Month packet here.
For more information about the ONE Old North End project, contact Bryan Stuart at 660 0440, ext 111.