Last week, Growing Food and Sustainability was awarded our very first grant, and then two more within the week!  We were one of 20 award recipients (out of over 800 applicants!) to receive Jamba Juice’s “It’s all about the fruits and veggies” grant which includes garden tools and $150 to spend on soil amendments and seeds.  Today we used some of it to buy more seed potatoes!  We were also awarded the Midwest Garden Grant, which will provide our program with $750 worth of garden equipment.  Finally, we were particularly excited to receive a Community Reinvestment Fund Grant from our local Willy Street Co-op.  This grant will fund the entire bike portion of our program including a bike and heavy-duty bike trailer, allowing us to haul everything we need for the program (compost, produce, even a lawn mower!) by bike!  My quads are already feeling the burn…

Our team is getting the word out to the community in many ways.  On May 1^st, we started our weekly Kids Activity Table at the Downtown Middleton Farmers’ Market.  Our goal is to engage kids with fun, hands-on activities, and to talk to community members about our program while at the same time encouraging increased attendance at this somewhat new and small market.  So far, our activities included potting-up tomato plants and playing a seedling guessing game.  We’ve heard from parents that we already have a few dedicated kids who are watering their tomato plants everyday and eagerly awaiting the next market activity!

One of our program leaders, Gabrielle, was recently interviewed on a local radio show!  She got a chance to talk about the goals of Growing Food and Sustainability and what inspired her and her sister, Natalie, to start the organization.  Take a listen here!

As June approaches, we are finalizing our team (stay tuned for team bios, we have a fantastic group!) and preparing for training week and our summer program.  As I write this, the weather is sunny and around 70 and I know that the tomato and pepper plants we are planting on Saturday’s workday are going to be very happy!

- Gabrielle

But this spring the garden is full of life again as volunteers and neighbors prepare it for a productive summer.

On a rainy Friday evening in March, our program leader team met with some neighbors at the Park Street Library branch to plan for the new season. Then on April 7^th we had our first community workday. We cleaned the lots, mowed the grass, and helped neighbors plant in their raised beds (seeds courtesy of John Scheeper’s Kitchen Garden Seeds and the Perennial Harmony Garden Shop!)

Last summer, we had a waiting list for raised beds until August, so this spring we decided to focus on expanding el jardín de Zion St to accommodate as many neighbors as possible. On April 21^st we participated in Global Youth in Service Day and hosted Hartford Boy Scouts and Public Allies in our garden. Together we built 35 raised beds and got started filling them with soil (courtesy of Flamig Farm!)

The next day was Earth Day, and we celebrated with Public Allies and more volunteers by hosting another workday at the garden to build the next 25 raised beds- which would bring us to our goal of 60 new beds- or doubling the growing capacity of the garden. Despite fears that we would be rained out, we finished 23 before the rain got bad. We would have kept going, but we ran out of screws! (My dad finished the last 2 in our garage at home).

Now both lots are full to the brim with beds. Our next step is to line and fill them all with healthy organic soil!

Join us for our next workday on May 12^th 10-2 to shovel shovel shovel and get those boxes ready for planting! We can’t wait to see them full of life this summer <3

Today we are launching a Kickstarter Campaign to help us raise funds to build new pilot gardens and demonstrate that this is an idea whose time has come. Last year, we built and operated a 700 square foot vegetable garden on borrowed land and produced a bounty of food that benefited our community. With four new homeowners ready to go, we are looking to generate resources to construct and support four new gardens that will allow up to 10 families to grow food together this summer and fall.

Read on for more information on the program itself and be sure to watch the video and visit the Kickstarter page linked below.

Here is how the Yard Share program works:

1. Our Program Leaders canvass single-family homes to find suitable spaces and willing hosts for new gardens.
2. We reach out to families in our Children’s gardening classes and flier the area to find community members interested in growing their own food or growing food for donation.
3. Awesome people like you visit our Kickstarter page and pledge monetary donations to support material purchases.
4. In early June, we construct the new gardens with the help of at-risk high school students engaged in our Spring program.
5. As soon as construction is complete, we invite the gardeners in for a training and ribbon cutting at their new garden bed.
6. Throughout the summer, Summer of Solutions Participants and Program Leaders provide technical and manual labor support to gardeners to ensure their success.
7. Gardeners, Garden Hosts, and the whole Summer of Solutions staff celebrate the season with a series of harvest potlucks and skill sharing workshops.

In a neighborhood where population density rests at 30,000 people per square mile and open space comes at a premium, this network has the creativity it needs to thrive within the constraints of our community. And the best part? It doesn’t stop in Rogers Park. We are developing a Tool-kit to Start Your Own Yard Share available in it’s initial release to contributors of $100 or more.

Please consider being a part of this ground-breaking effort and visit our Kickstarter page to contribute. We’ve included plenty of perks to get your mouth watering, including some limited edition jars of our Chicago rooftop honey! And come soon, because we’ve only got 10 of them!

With hopes for gardens everywhere,

Molly, Nell, Ben and Peter

Performers at our community fundraiser.

Build It Up just hosted our first big community fundraiser on Saturday April 21st.  We were at the Next Door at the Acoustic Coffeehouse in downtown Johnson City.  The event had a kids fair, silent art auction and almost 12 hours of great live music!  It was a rainy, cold day and we were a little disappointed with the turnout.  Despite the fact that we did not raise as much money as we’d hoped, a few very cool connections were made and we hope some productive partnerships can be formed in the near future.  One of our performers was so excited that Build It Up is promoting local food and urban gardening in East Tennessee that he offered up some land for us to build a community garden on!  Community events–even if they don’t pull in oodles of money–are still great for meeting like minded people.  Building a vibrant, sustainable local food system is going to take many strong community partnerships and if we are not out there making noise and having fun, then those connections might be missed.

Lexy putting compost on a raised bed.

At our community gardens, we have had some very productive work days.  Rachel and Stephanie are organizing the work at the new garden at Shakti, a local community center for women in Johnson City.  Lexy has spearheaded the efforts at the community garden on the campus of ETSU.  Almost all of the plots at the ETSU garden have been claimed by students and faculty and we are hoping to involve these gardeners in a summer of learning and fun.  Build It Up is getting about 250 square feet of space for growing, and combined with the space at Shakti, we hope to have plenty of produce to feed ourselves, provide for our workshops, and distribute some to local soup kitchens.  The weather has become quite chilly and wet (not unusual for April) but we are hoping the sunshine will soon return.  Planting will get underway in early May, once all chance of frost has passed.

If you like what you’ve just read, then friend us on facebook (www.facebook.com/BuildItUpETN) and let us know you want to get involved!

Joshua Kahn Russell will help you learn how to build powerful movements that are bigger than the sum of their parts. Timothy DenHerder-Thomas will walk you through the steps to building a successful sustainable business that also serves your community. Zach Wahls will give a crash course in public speaking 101 and then share some ways to avoid common rhetorical traps that environmentalists fall into. (If you want to check out his public speaking chops, look up his David Letterman appearance earlier this week.) Rachel Aitkens will walk you through the basics of effective fundraising from individuals and help you get volunteers fired up about fundraising. Zo Tobi will help you bring ease, clarity, grace, and focus to your work and your life as a whole.

Each webinar costs $25, with $5 discounts for Grand Aspirations members and for students, seniors, and under- and unemployed people. Please sign up and tell your friends! Webinars are an exciting new way for Grand Aspirations to connect you with powerful skills and generate valuable resources for the organization’s work.

The daylong event, Focus the Classroom, encouraged teachers to relate the subjects they teach to current environmental issues. Last summer, Zach Gruenhagen, Bailey McClellan and Noelle Waldschmidt from the Iowa City solutionary team worked to complete a website with sustainability-focused lesson plans for every subject area, to help teachers more easily integrate the environment into their classes. In addition, presentations ran all day from environmental leaders in the Iowa City community, including Tim Dwight – a Iowa City High graduate and former professional football player.

Dwight, a popular speaker at both high schools, co-founded a renewable energy company called Integrated Power Corporation after retiring from the San Diego Chargers. At the Focus the Classroom event, he gave presentations extolling the virtues of solar energy.

“This shift [to renewable energy] that I’m going to talk about is your generational shift, and it’s going to be massive. Producing energy with wind and solar will change the world because those resources are available anywhere, and you’re going to see it,” he told students at West High school.

Dwight was joined by others including New Pioneer Co-op Outreach and Education coordinator Scott Koepke, Iowa City recycling coordinator Jen Jordan and University of Iowa Director of Sustainability Liz Christiansen. The speakers brought everything from live red wriggler worms to a battery-powered experiment that converted salt water into bleach. In a presentation at City High, teacher Mike Loots turned the students loose and after ten minutes, students from miscellaneous classes, with varying investment in sustainability, were almost all raising their hands to share an idea – from a trash clean up by the mall, to more vegan options at lunch, to guerilla gardening.

“A lot of times, as much as teachers try to bring in outside applications of what we’re studying, it’s really nice that we can see how to take what we’re learning and apply it to the world around us. You can actually go out and change things … and Focus the Classroom really reminds us of that,” said West High senior Javier Miranda-Bartlett, a member of EcoCentric and participant in the day’s activities.

According to Miranda-Bartlett, the message definitely reached the students in attendance.

“[My favorite part was seeing] the enthusiasm my classmates had for the whole concept and just how they actually got pumped, which surprised me. Also, [I loved] discovering that we have this wealth of resources of really knowledgeable people that are willing to help and work with us, and it was really empowering,” Miranda-Bartlett said.

Check out this video for a little background on past & current ICSOS work. Thanks to Nathan Meyer for his awesome video skills!

Applications for ICSOS are still open! Apply at grandaspirations.org – we’re looking for help with our local garden and energy efficiency campaigns!

This spring, Growing Food and Sustainability (SoS Middleton) has programmed and cleaned-out the greenhouse at the high school so that after years of disuse, it is now up and running and growing beautiful seedlings!  Our program only needs to use a fraction of the greenhouse space, so we would like to invite all community members to start garden seeds in the greenhouse this spring!

Every weekend this spring we will host weekly Community Greenhouse Hours when the greenhouse will be open and a Program Leader will be present.  This is time when anyone using the greenhouse can check on their plants, plant more seedlings, remove their seedlings, etc.  Community Greenhouse Hours will be posted on our website homepage.  For guidelines and more details, please click here.  We look forward to seeing the greenhouse teeming with life and activity!

Watch Growing Food and Sustainability’s Video Debut!

Join these lovely ladies and the rest of the Middleton team for an incredible summer!  We still have openings for full-time participant positions and stipends available (allocated based on financial need).  To apply, please click here.  Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until May 15th.  We hope you’ll join us!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at: GrowingFoodandSustainability@gmail.com

Gabrielle and Natalie Hinahara
Founders, Program Leaders

This is Leo, your friendly Portland Summer of Solutions Program Leader! I’m just writing to inform you about some of the exciting things that have been happening around Portland.

Two weeks ago, we signed our first Memorandum of Understanding with a local community partner, Million Monarchs! Million Monarchs focuses on individual and community solar power projects, specifically seeking to connect residents of low income communities to the resources they need to finance solar power installations. This is not only good for the environment, but actually saves money in the long run!

This summer, Portland Summer of Solutions will work with Million Monarchs to raise community awareness of their solar installation efforts through their inclusion as an item on our survey-challenge model of community engagement! Furthermore, Summer of Solutions participants will work directly with Million Monarchs to create and implement strategies to raise awareness of individual and community solar projects in the deep Southeast neighborhoods of Portland!

Hope everything’s going well across the country!

Leo

Program Co-coordinators, Barbara and Dan

The sun has begun to shine and cherry blossoms are in full bloom all across Seattle, serving as an apt metaphor for the exploding momentum of our summer program! Last week marked the launch of our participant outreach campaign, including a new Facebook page and website (www.sosseattle.org) which are now up and running. Just two weeks ago we secured our first major donation: $10,000! These initial funds, from a family foundation, have provided a great jumping off point for our larger fundraising efforts. Local non-profit, Sustainable Seattle, is serving as our fiscal sponsor this summer, providing shared use of their 501c3 status, accounting support, and many great connections throughout the community.

Seattle Center

As we launch the first ever Summer of Solutions program in Seattle, we could not be happier about our home base: we will be operating from the heart of Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle and Monorail. We’re partnering with The Next Fifty (www.thenextfifty.org), a six-month, citywide celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the 1962 world’s fair, which brought those iconic structures to Seattle. This partnership gives our program unprecedented access to some of the most innovative and exciting workshops, performances, and exhibits ever to grace the Emerald City. Our presence at The Next Fifty offers us a unique opportunity to amplify and extend the stories of our local program onto the global stage, where we will harness the power of new media to interact with others doing similar projects worldwide.

One of the most exciting elements of our program is our DIY guidebook. Throughout the program, participants will document their experiences via journalism, photography, videography, and mixed media to create and share powerful stories of their work online with the world. We will combine these multimedia stories with step-by-step instructions for replicating the projects we’ve engaged in to create a digital DIY Guide to Solutionary Living, which will be made available to the public at a closing celebration event in early August. This guidebook will serve as a powerful, accessible, and incredibly practical tool for community engagement and action.

Summer of Solutions | Seattle is now accepting applications for program leaders, participants, and volunteers to join us for a deeply creative, connected, and energizing summer experience! Apply Now: www.sosseattle.org. We look forward to seeing you in Seattle!

Much love from the SOS | Seattle crew,

~Dan, Barbara, Mia