Category Archives: Summer of Solutions

SoS Middleton: Making Art and Winning Awards

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Thank you to everyone who made Growing Food and Sustainability’s first year a success! Please take a look below to see all that Summer of Solutions-Middleton accomplished.

Program Mission:
We started GFS to engage youth in hands-on environmental education through food production, cooking, art, biking, and multi-age relationship building. We ran a summer garden camp, organized community workdays, piloted a bike-powered compost service, and delivered produce donations to those in need.

Accomplishments:

  • 27 students ages 4-17 involved in the summer garden camp
  • 108 hours of garden summer camp taught within 9 weeks
  • 1,260 pounds of produce grown and harvested
  • 1,220 pounds diverted from the waste stream through our bike-powered compost pick-up service
  • 730 pounds of produce donated to the Middleton Outreach Ministry Food Pantry
  • 229 pounds of produce donated to the Middleton Senior Center

Since our Garden Summer Camp finished-up in August, we have been working with the Ecology Clubs at Middleton High School and the Clark Street Community School to keep students involved in garden and sustainability education. These groups helped us prepare the garden and youth farm for the winter, learned how to construct a light table to grow plants indoors year-round, and participated in conversation about our food system.

CSCS Continue reading →

Little Rock Summer of Solutions: Getting off the ground

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This Winter and Spring, our team in Little Rock, Arkansas will be organizing Little Rock Summer of Solutions. We are really excited about putting together this 8-week summer program that will address environmental justice issues in a traditionally underserved area of town. Our focus area is ripe for social reform, we have a passionate team, and we believe that our initiatives will bring healthy food, homes, and community feeling to our neighborhood focus: the 12th Street Corridor of Little Rock Arkansas.

The Central Arkansas community:

There is already a huge movement in the central Arkansas community for urban development and community cooperation. Young people are breaking new ground in the local food movement, alternative energy sector, anti-oppression work, and entrepreneurial innovation as evidenced by a growing wave of youth-run urban farms, energy auditing businesses, feminist book clubs, non-profit organizations, cooperative start-ups and other initiatives.

For the last few years, members of the Little Rock community have worked towards the historic preservation of the downtown area, a traditionally low-income neighborhood. Assortments of sustainable, small businesses are opening here, and seasonal community festivals are bringing new energy downtown. While several of our potential Summer of Solutions program leaders and participants have been elbow deep in this work for years, the low-income inhabitants of the neighborhood have been excluded from the benefits that are accruing to already privileged individuals and groups. Our work will be focused on co-creating community programs that are designed to benefit the members of the community where we will be working. Continue reading →

Art in the Garden and Share the Good!

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Cross-posted from Summer of Solutions Hartford

It’s been a rainy week at the Burns School Garden!  In order to stay out of the mud, this week we did a botany/art workshop in the garden with kindergarteners!

This summer we spent over a month removing small shards of glass from this planter that was left over from an old construction project on the building. Now it’s full of greens!

The students drew loose-leaf lettuce, kale, swiss chard, and arugula.

Continue reading →

Coming Together Over Food

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

GFS kicked off this fall with two bountiful, joyful events!  On October 15th we worked with the MHS Ecology Club to put on the 8th annual Organic Dinner.  It was really exciting because this was the first year the meal included produce that was grown in the school gardens.  As has become tradition, The Roman Candle Pizzeria catered the main course, which was a pasta dish containing our veggies, Clasen’s, a local bakery, provided bread sticks, and the Chocolate Shoppe donated ice cream.

In order to have enough fresh veggies in the middle of October, a few weeks ahead of time we harvested a bunch of kale, onions, peppers, and eggplant and blanched and froze them so we could have fresh veggies, in the pasta dish.  We also harvested kale the day of the event for a fresh kale salad.  Between the dinner and the silent auction, the event raised $1,400 which will be split between the Ecology Club, the school’s Envirothon team, our program Growing Food and Sustainability, and the Friends of Pheasant Branch, the stewards of our local nature preserve.

It was a really great experience to work with both of the high school Ecology Clubs on the Organic Dinner.  There was a lot of fun to be had harvesting the veggies and I think the experience of creating a delicious, sustainable meal to serve to their teachers, friends and family was really rewarding.

MHS Ecology Club students preparing kale and eggplant

Continue reading →

Rain gardens, greenhouses, and hunger walks

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This post is by sustainable community organizer Lookman Muhammed. You can read his first post here.

Lookman Muhammed (r) with Ethan Viets-VanLear, building a rain garden in Rogers Park.

My name is Lookman Muhammed. I work with A Just Harvest’s Genesis Project specifically the “Aquaponic Social Enterprise”. My first blog post explained a lot about my work here, what I do, and the purpose of my work with A Just Harvest and LETS GO Chicago. These two organizations have a common goal to fight hunger and poverty through urban agriculture. My responsibility is working to maintain and increase the effectiveness of our aquaponic system located in Gale Academy on Marshfield and Jonquil in the community of Rogers Park. The North of Howard area is where a great majority of the population we engage reside. Continue reading →

Report-Back on the Hartford Environmental Summit

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On October 25th, Dave and Jen represented Summer of Solutions Hartford at the Hartford Environmental Summit.

We enjoyed a keynote address by Gwendolyn Hallsmith who has worked globally to help cities become sustainable, and found that Summer of Solutions was featured in her presentation! About halfway through her Power Point, this picture popped up:

This photo is from the August Gathering, which our team hosted at the end of our program this year. Program leaders and participants from all around the country came to the Emanuel Lutheran Church in Hartford to celebrate successful summers and plan for the future! It was so cool to see this great group of people highlighted in Gwendolyn Hallsmith’s presentation about the cool sustainable things happening in Hartford!

Continue reading →

Through the lens of a Yard Sharer… Food, fire, magic, and community: Our work on reclaiming Place

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Cross-posted from Letsgochicago.org

By Molly Costello

With the arrival of November and all its triumphant color, calm, and hints of frost, so comes the end of our second season as Yard Sharers. We celebrated the closing of another beautiful growing season with a bonfire, soup, and hot chocolate at our friend and land lender Bob’s house. This year we were able to expand our Rogers Park Yard Sharing Network from 1 to 6 back yards and expand our gardener population from one learning program (us) to around 25 new growers.

But as things wind down in our gardens, our work on the network picks up inside! To date, we have spent most of our yard share work time outside building and maintaining the network’s material infrastructure. In line with our vision of making this network flourish and grow, however, we understand our need to develop more of the organizational elements of the network. Therefore, Nell and I have been busy working on financial goals and re-writing land-use-agreements in hope to have a sound model to share with new Summer of Solutions programs come January. Continue reading →

SoS Hartford Blog Feature from Christine Bullock

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Summer of Solutions Hartford was interviewed for Christine Bullock’s blog! Here’s a segment of the interview:

“Gardening Q&A with Summer of Solutions Hartford”

Cooking and creating healthy recipes is a great way to ensure that you’re conscientious about nutrition. But cooking is only half the battle, that fresh and tasty produce has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? In our second installment of Gardening Q&A’s, we’ve asked garden growing expert Jennifer Roach of Summer of Solutions Hartford to tell us a little bit about what it is they do.

Christine Bullock: First off, tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got involved in gardening with schools and children.

Jennifer Roach: We are Summer of Solutions Hartford- a 10 week summer program for young people in Hartford to learn about sustainable food systems and work to build an urban food system here in the city. Our team has built two community gardens and two school gardens over the past two summers.”

Check out the full article here! : http://www.christinebullock.com/blog/2012/10/24/gardening-qa-with-summer-of-solutions-hartford/

The Harvest Festival at Burns Latino Studies Academy

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Cross-posted from Summer of Solutions Hartford

Summer of Solutions Hartford had the honor of participating in a great fall tradition at the Burns Latino Studies Academy called the Harvest Festival!

After school ended for the day, COMPASS Youth Collaborative set up a Halloween party for the children and families of the Burns School, complete with face paint, a haunted hallway, and dance floor!

In the spirit of the evening, we harvested red and green tomatoes, white and rainbow chard, carrots, spinach, mint, basil, oregano, kale and lettuce from the Burns School Garden and Wesley Colbert Zion Street Community Garden and set up a booth at the festival. We showed off photos of the garden and the workshops we’ve done with K-2nd and shared our bountiful harvest with the Burns community! Continue reading →

Hartford Environmental Summit

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Cross-posted from Summer of Solutions Hartford.

We’re excited to attend the Hartford Environmental Summit this Thursday to meet and collaborate with other Hartford residents and organizations who are working to make Hartford more sustainable. There are 10 working groups available, but you’ll find us at conversations about youth and urban farming!

There are still 30 registrations open, so it’s not too late to sign up and contribute to this crucial conversation! “We invite you to join us at the first Hartford Environmental Summit intended to increase collaborative involvement and action among private and nonprofit organizations and committed individuals in projects that are transforming the City of Hartford into a sustainable community.”

The summit is Thursday, Oct 25th from 5-8pm at the Academy of Engineering and Green Technology (55 Forest Street, Hartford)