#citysprouts

[kimlowe]

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You want to change something after last week’s election, then begin here — empower our children. Give a kid a garden and not only does that one child change forever, their community changes! I’ve seen it. I’m lucky to have met some of those children. I’ve met the parents who are also changed. And I’ve met the teachers who are there in the gardens with their students, growing alongside them. Begin here, with @citysproutsma #boston #schoolgarden #garden #gardeningwithkids #kidsinthegarden #stem #science #bostonpublicschools #cambridge #ediblegarden #organic #organiclife #organicgardening #citysprouts #grow #garden #dogood #notforprofit #nonprofit #community (at Boston, Massachusetts)

[fundraise-blog]

City Sprouts ready for Dig It! 2013

Join City Sprouts on Thursday, March 14, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. for the annual CitySprouts fundraiser Dig It! 2013 at the Liberty Hotel at 225 Charles Street in Boston.

There is a live auction with Master of Ceremonies, David Coffin. Items include: Private lamb butchering demonstration by Boston Chef Josh Lewin with dinner for 6 at Beacon Hill Bistro; Pair of custom built children's chairs by artist Mitch Ryerson; and Signature Cider pressing by CitySprouts staff brought to the school of your choice.

Raffle items include Gardener's Paradise, Locavore's Delight, Family Staycation, Savor the Flavor of Cambriville, Night at the Opera and much more. Raffle tickets can be purchased below. 1 for $20 or 6 for $100. You do not need to be present at the drawing to participate.

CitySprouts school gardens ensure that hands-on learning, environmental stewardship,and the experience of growing and eating food becomes part of the public education all children receive. We build capacity in our partner schools to make the outdoor classroom garden a resource for teachers, parents and community.

City Sprouts currently operates in 18 public schools in the Greater Boston Area: Cambridge, Boston, Lynn and Gloucester.

To make a donation to this cause, visit: https://www.fundraise.com/digit2013

[gloucesterfoodcorps-blog]

A Successful Kickoff to Cafeteria Events

Last week we kicked off a series of monthly cafeteria events at Beeman and Vets’ with Super Cook Day! Students from both schools interviewed the cafeteria staff beforehand about some of their favorite recipes to cook both at school and at home, and about what they like to do when they’re not making lunch. Then on Wednesday at Beeman and Thursday at Vets’, Sarah, Grace and I hung up signs encouraging students to give an extra special smile or thank you to the cafeteria staff.  Even though we notified students ahead of time, they managed to keep the special day a surprise until the signs went up!

During lunch we asked kids to sign aprons for our “super cooks”, and they were super excited to join in. They wrote beautiful thank you messages. The second grade classes at Vets’ even wrote thank you notes beforehand as part of their writing unit.  Seeing kids stretch their hands way up in the air to make sure the aprons came to them showed me just how excited they were to contribute to making someone else’s day better. But the best parts of both days were the looks on the staff’s faces when they saw the aprons covered in simple messages of gratitude. It was a great reminder of how far a relatively small gesture can go if it’s sincere, and how big of a thank you a small hand can write when it has a sharpie to work with.

In the coming months, our cafeteria events will shift to focus on adventurous eating. We’ll be highlighting some of the new items on the lunch menu and encouraging kids to be bold, try new things, and taste new taste, just like they do in the gardens. Like last week’s events, the following ones will all involve take-home-able color-in-able placemats with recipes, cartoons, and more!

Happy lunching!

Erin

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[gloucesterfoodcorps-blog]

Watch this piece from the Associated Press to see what Grace, Sarah, and Erin are doing at Beeman and Vet's this year and what else FoodCorps is doing throughout the country!

[swellr-blog]

CitySprouts Fundraiser at Flatbread & Co. in Davis Square

By Sara Hopson (@sahopson)

On Tuesday, 3/5 of the Swellr team convened at Flatbread Pizza in Davis Square to help support an awesome community program, CitySprouts. We enjoyed two pizzas - the Community Flatbread and Mopsy's Kalua Pork Pie - and a game of candlepin bowling. Flatbread donated some of each pizza sale to benefit the CitySprouts program, which partners with Cambridge Public Schools to start school gardens.

CitySprouts enables educators to incorporate gardening into the curriculum in meaningful ways rather than isolating it as a strictly extracurricular activity. This makes it integral to what the students are doing in the classroom as well as in the garden. The students have access to the gardens outside of school hours as well, and into the summer. The program, which turns 11 this year, serves every K-8th grade school in the Cambridge district, numbering over 4,000 kids.

The initiative teaches kids about growing food, nurturing the environment, and sustaining resources. In a video on their site, co-program director and former school principal Joe Petner explains, "It's about finding ways to support our teachers - to give them planning time, a curriculum, and professional support - that enables them to do this, to take off and use the garden as an extension of the classroom".

Before we bowled, we also had the pleasure of chatting with program manager Kim Goldstein who was hanging out for the duration of the fundraiser. We look forward to hopefully working with CitySprouts in the future! 

(And in case you were wondering, Andrew won. Not by much, though.)

Contrary to this photo, Shonak didn't really have much to smile about while we were candlepin bowling...  it's way harder than it looks!

Be sure to check out the CitySprouts calendar for upcoming events, join their mailing list, and you may as well pencil in Flatbread Tuesdays on your own calendar - each week they hold a similar fundraiser for other community organizations. What a great excuse to embarrass yourself like I did while bowling and enjoy some delicious pizza (they also have a full bar, for those of you 21 and over).