Garden Workday at San Francisco Community

Members and students of Urban Sprouts, Project OLE, and Justice Brothers came together for a garden workday at San Francisco Community School on a bright, sunny October afternoon.

Armed with wheelbarrows, shovels, and hand tools, we created new beds bordered by rice wattles to prevent soil erosion and to maximize garden space. Volunteers and staff also harvested summer crops, prepared compost, cleared established beds for fall planting, and carried out general garden tasks. Our day was even captured by film students from San Francisco State University for a short documentary on urban beautification in the Excelsior district.

What are we growing now in our newly prepared beds? Peas, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, radish, cover crops, garlic, yarrow, cauliflowers, strawberries...

Support Urban Sprouts

Please join us for an evening of great food for a great cause.

Frjtz Fries in Hayes Valley has generously offered to host a fundraising night for our gardens on October 4th. From 4pm to 9pm a portion of all sales will be donated to Urban Sprouts.
Bring your friends, families, co-workers, all are welcome!

October 4th 2009
Frjtz Fries
581 Hayes Street (at Laguna)
4:00pm-9:00pm
Hope to see you there!

For more information please click here

Read up on the State of Urban Sprouts

At our recent Garden Brunch fundraising event, we unveiled our plans for the coming year, and how, during this time of growing interest in school and urban gardens, we will share our expertise in garden-based education with more students, parents, and schools.

Read the address here. An excerpt:

We’ve gathered you all here at a time when economic crisis affects us all, whether you or your loved ones have experienced job loss, retirement dreams cut short, or belt-tightening in the household budget, even affecting your day to day food choices. Today, as we look for hope, comfort and meaning, we have a great opportunity to share the power in the simple act of gardening. Victory Gardens kept our country healthy and hopeful during early 20th century wartime and Depression, and our children grew 40% of our country’s produce right in their own school gardens.

With this inspiration, this year Urban Sprouts has launched a brand new program, our Family Farmers-in-Residence program. Read more here -->

Greens, Eggs & Jam 2009

A HUGE Thank You to everyone who attended, cooked, invited friends, helped out, and made Sunday's Greens, Eggs & Jam Garden Brunch fundraising event a delicious success!!

Over 65 people were in attendance, plus many children, and we raised over $10,400 in gifts and pledges. This is about a 30% increase in attendance from last year.

This inspiring support from our community is what enables us to keep our day-to-day work going strong for the over 700 students who count on us! Plus, we unveiled our new plans for the coming year, in which Urban Sprouts will step up as leaders in the healthy food movement by sharing our methods, our research results, and our sustainable leadership style with more schools and educators all over California and the West!

On Sunday we gathered at Ida B. Wells High School and fun was had by all. For the full photo spread, CLICK HERE. Our guests started by touring the Wells school garden, and then joined us inside to taste the harvest.

Our friends from Nopa Restaurant (below, setting up) prepared the delicious frittata pictured at top left, made with produce from our school gardens (including purple potatoes, fava beans, collard greens, kale, rosemary and sage). Nopa's biscuits and gravy were also a huge hit. (I can't wait to try out their new restaurant, Nopalito!)
Student chefs from Martin Luther King Middle School and International Studies Academy also prepared dishes, including vegetable spring rolls and pesto pasta with fava beans. Yum! Mario (at right, below) also inspired our guests with a speech about his and his classmates' experiences in the MLK school garden.

The festive ambiance was greatly enhanced by our neighborhood bluegrass musicians, led by friend of Urban Sprouts Jordan Klein on banjo.
Decorations came from our own school gardens, including flowers like these!We couldn't have pulled this off without all the wonderful help from Ida B. Wells' staff and students, Urban Sprouts' staff, Advisory Board, and volunteers, and a Saturday volunteer group from USF. Thank you!

If you didn't make it to this year's brunch, we hope to see you next time!

And don't forget, our MONTHLY GARDEN TOURS will be starting up again in May, and it's never too late to make your spring contribution to our efforts. To donate today, CLICK HERE!

You're Invited to our Spring Brunch!

Experience Urban Sprouts! Tour the Ida B. Wells school garden and try garden activities like seed saving, seed sowing and herb harvesting . . . and enjoy home-grown live music for some extra-sweet jam!

Taste brunch made with crops grown in our school gardens, prepared by local chefs from Nopa Restaurant and by our students!

Support our work by bringing friends and family (kids welcome), and bring your checkbook! You will be invited to give - no gift is too large or too small. Every donation helps urban youth learn to grow their own food at school.

If you can't attend our event, but you'd like to make a donation today, please click here.

The State of Urban Sprouts

Enjoy this excerpt from our recent Garden Brunch event, of a speech that laid out the past, present and future plans for Urban Sprouts' work.

Our Early Days to Now
This year, Urban Sprouts has worked with over 700 students, and supported school garden programs at six middle and high schools in San Francisco’s under-served neighborhoods.

The seeds of Urban Sprouts were sown five years ago, when educator Dr. Michelle Ratcliffe conducted her dissertation research on the benefits of school gardens at three middle schools in San Francisco. When I look back to 2003, it’s amazing to realize how far we’ve come. At Luther Burbank Middle School, we encountered a few solitary teachers striving to build a garden in a bleak and neglected school by scrapping together any resources they could find. Today, Urban Sprouts partners with six schools with thriving gardens, and the Obamas are planting vegetables on the White House lawn. Times have changed.

First, I’d like to share with you some of the ways that school gardens are so transformative for youth, families, schools and communities. I’m sure you’re aware of how much the obesity epidemic affects young people, even here in San Francisco. We hear from many youth in our programs that preparing meals from food they grew themselves dramatically improves their attitudes towards healthy foods and helps them make real changes in their eating habits. When students were asked about their eating habits in focus groups last year, in 78% of responses students said they eat more fruits and vegetables than before, and in 92% of responses they said they try to eat more healthy foods and less unhealthy foods. Some examples:

“I want to be eating more greens EVERYDAY, and less sugar. I plan on sharing my knowledge about nutrition with my parents and brother.”
“The garden helps you do better in school because it keeps you healthy.”
“I do better in school now because my body is not being energized with Cheetos, it’s being energized with lettuce!”

Also, by nurturing living things in the diverse garden ecosystem students also develop their desire to protect the environment. When students were asked about the environment in focus groups last year, in 53% of responses students said they care or worry about the environment more than they did before. Some examples:

“I’m worried more about pollution because we depend on nature to survive, to grow our food, our vegetables, and trees to breathe.”
“I plan to teach my family more about soil health, and how our health relates to the world's health.”
“I want to recycle more and compost instead of put it into the landfill.”

And my favorite quote of all:

“In the garden, I learned to grow up and be a successful person.”

So you see, school gardens can be life-changing for young people. But, there’s one catch. Not just any school garden will bring about these inspiring changes. What we do in the garden with youth matters.

That’s why Urban Sprouts’ school garden programs are different. We are guided by a research-based “recipe for success” that enables our school gardens to achieve big results. Dr. Michelle Ratcliffe has developed her dissertation research into a guiding framework for garden-based education. In other words, we’re not only measuring the outcomes or results of our program, we are measuring the “inputs,” making sure that every young person gets the highest quality education in the school garden.

Our Shared Future
We’ve gathered you all here at a time when economic crisis affects us all, whether you or your loved ones have experienced job loss, retirement dreams cut short, or belt-tightening in the household budget, even affecting your day to day food choices. Today, as we look for hope, comfort and meaning, we have a great opportunity to share the power in the simple act of gardening. Victory Gardens kept our country healthy and hopeful during early 20th century wartime and Depression, and our children grew 40% of our country’s produce right in their own school gardens.

With this inspiration, this year Urban Sprouts has launched a brand new program, our Family Farmers-in-Residence program. We’ll provide school families with resources and support to plant their own food gardens right on school grounds. The Farmers-in-Residence share their cultural crops and recipes with peers and grow fresh food to feed their own families. This spring, five family teams including moms, dads, grandmothers and children, have broken ground on their family garden plots.

School gardens can also drive the demand for food grown by local and sustainable farms, as we develop a committed base of consumers. Local agriculture creates jobs and puts money in regular people’s pockets, a true local stimulus package. Our neighbors to the north, in Oregon and Washington, are creating policies that turn their public schools into engines of economic growth, as a huge market for local farm produce. By planting home gardens and spreading the word about supporting local farms, we can keep our families healthy and sow the seeds of a sustainable future.
Urban Sprouts brings this message to youth and their families in San Francisco’s working neighborhoods, investing in the next generation of green consumers, green voters, and the green collar economy.

Now, we want to share our message and our successful methods with more youth, teachers, and communities. In the coming year, we will step forward as leaders in this movement. We’ll take our show on the road, providing a series of trainings with in-depth follow-up coaching for schools and community leaders all over California and the West. We’re making plans with partners from LA to Seattle, in urban food deserts where no grocery stores exist for miles, and in Central Valley communities that ‘export’ vegetables to feed our nation but leave their own residents hungry in a rural food desert. By sharing our experiences and learning from our neighbors, we can strengthen this healthy food movement at the grassroots level, outside the Bay Area bubble.

But you know what, there’s something else that makes Urban Sprouts special. It’s the reason we’ve invited you all here today, to get to know us in person. People like us, who take a stand for our beliefs and work tirelessly to lead and organize in our communities, we often feel loneliness and burnout even as we achieve victories in our work. As we step up our leadership and broaden our reach, Urban Sprouts is planning for not only the sustainability of our programs but the personal sustainability of our leaders and members. Through careful planning, we’ll ensure that our staff feel supported, we’ll collaborate to share our increasing workload, and we’ll continue to provide living wages and health benefits to all staff. With your investment, we will step forward as leaders in this movement, sharing our methods, our vision, and our integrity. Your partnership will make all the difference.

Thank you very much.

NEW! Monthly School Garden Tours

Introducing our new monthly school garden tours!

Interested in learning more about Urban Sprouts and our school garden programs?
Want to explore how you can get involved and be a part of Urban Sprouts?
Hoping to learn more about garden-based education to bring back to your community?

Join our monthly tour at one of our school gardens, where you'll hear about how we got started, all that we do today, and our hopes and dreams for where we can go!

Meet our Executive Director, Abby Jaramillo, and learn about the journey that led her to start Urban Sprouts and to bring school gardens to over 2,400 San Francisco youth (so far). Next tour will be held on Friday, March 20th at 12:30pm, at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.

SF School Gardens Conference '08!

Urban Sprouts was proud to be part of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance's 3rd Conference on October 10th-11th. The weekend was like a party for the school garden movement — new things to learn (photos at right and below), like cob building, mosaics, carpentry, and seed saving, and time to spend with old and new friends inspired by our shared mission!

Friday night we heard speaker Richard Louv, who gave us one great pep talk about how our work is changing the world! Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods, describes how youth are suffering psychologically from a lack of connection to nature, which he names nature-deficit disorder.

Louv gave us many powerful examples of how school gardens change lives. He told us that experiences in nature are therapeutic for children with hyperactivity disorders and depression, and they develop executive functioning (self-regulation or self-discipline) in kids. He described studies showing that paved schoolyards bring out aggressive games and leadership styles, namely bullying, while natural play settings bring out imaginative play and creative and collaborative leadership in children. In fact, unstructured nature-based play is so good for children, Louv recommended it as the best way to get your child to a top college. Wow! There wasn't a dry eye in the place.

On Saturday, I led a workshop titled, The Real Impacts of School Gardens: How to Make Change and Measure It. I had 3 whole hours — enough time to lead the group through our Garden-based Education Model in depth, to really understand the model and try it out on their own programs. I had enough time to create a nice flow during the workshop, complete with group games, reflection, and drawing activities! It was a great group and we all learned a lot from each other.

The response to Louv's work and the popularity of my workshop showed how much the school garden movement has matured. We are not just building school gardens because they are nice, pretty, and make kids happy. We are creating major social change. In the last few years, we have shown that school gardens impact children individually — developing children socially and psychologically, helping them succeed in school, and changing their behaviors as they eat more vegetables, exercise more, and become environmental stewards.

But, now we are seeing that school gardens do much, much more. They transform schools from their prison-yard look to a green and inviting environment, drawing families in, to make schools stronger. They make our neighborhoods cleaner, greener and friendlier. AND, school gardens teach our children to be our nation's future farmers. Our youth will enter the green collar economy in a few years, in a world where we will have been forced to design a new food system that is not dependent on fossil fuels. Our children will be growing and consuming local food, right here in our neighborhoods. And you saw it here first, in San Francisco's own schoolyards!

Above: SGFSA Conference organziers, Arden, Sharon & Rachel
Photos by Jennifer Thacher

Youth Teaching Peers to Compost

Urban Sprouts partnered with our friends at Garden for the Environment to lead workshops at Breaking Ground: the Urban Gardening Youth Conference on Saturday, Sept 27th.

The event was held in San Francisco's Mission district and attended by youth from high schools all over the Bay Area! Workshop topics included green jobs, composting, gardening, green building, food systems, and even a bike ride to urban gardens all over the Mission! And the day ended with delicious Mission Pies.

Urban Sprouts' own Walter Pan, a student from our in-class and summer programs, co-led a workshop on composting and vermiculture (worm composting). I'll let Walter tell you about it himself:

Hi, I’m one of the volunteers in this activity. It was really fun getting to teach others about composting. Composting is very important but what I realized in my school was that very few knew about compost. And knowing that other schools care about composting makes me feel well. The crowd and weather was really nice that day as a result there’s this festival-like feeling.

A big Thank You to Walter, all the conference organizers, and to Nicole from the GFE for making our workshops happen!

Salad Day and School's Out!

The last couple of weeks of school were a flurry of activity as we rushed to prepare the gardens for summer vacation, held end-of-the-year parties and BBQs, and said goodbye to our friends and teachers.

Of course, we couldn't end the year without one last garden bash. At MLK MS and Excelsior MS we held our annual Salad Day events. We harvested huge amounts of lettuce and veggies, made homemade ranch dressing, collected flowers for decorations, and created advertisement posters. Then, we setup a table in the cafeteria at lunchtime and served fresh salad to the whole school.

The salad was a huge hit -- one student told me she ate eight small plates of salad! Many students have told me that they don't like school lunches, so... I think everyday should be Salad Day, don't you?

Here is our recipe for delicious homemade ranch dressing - it goes great on everything, from salad to chicken strips. You can also find it in the Urban Sprouts cookbook, which you can get by sending an e-mail to: abby AT urbansprouts dot org.

Ranch Dressing

Ingredients:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1/2 cup sour cream/buttermilk
1/2 cup buttermilk (or less, adjust for desired thickness)
1/2 teaspoon dried chives
1/2 teaspoon dried/fresh parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried/fresh dill weed
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper


In a large bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, sour cream, buttermilk, chives, parsley, dill, garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper. Adjust seasonings to taste. Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes before serving.

Coffee & Kale a Success!

A HUGE Thank You to everyone who attended our Coffee & Kale Garden Brunch at Ida B. Wells High School on Sunday. This was the first time ever we have hosted an event like this. And it was so much fun!

First, in preparation, students harvested five boxes of produce from all our school gardens, including kale (of course), beets, onions, turnips, radishes, lettuces, sage, and lots of flowers. And we delivered them to our neighborhood chefs!


Then, on Sunday, Jeff and Laurence from Nopa Restaurant transformed our produce into beautiful fritatas with onion, kale, sage and more, crostini with radishes, and salad, to feed our hungry guests!

At Coffee & Kale, guests enjoyed garden tours, garden-grown greens cooked by students, seed saving, and a brief presentation with remarks by Claudia Anderson (Ida B's principal), Claire & Julius (2 students from our programs), Lena (board member), and me (our director)! The event was a huge success, especially for our first try! More than 50 guests attended and we raised over $10,000 in gifts and pledges.

THANK YOU!!!! To everyone who helped, attended, and contributed, you made a huge difference for Urban Sprouts! Here are some photos, and for more visit our Flickr page.

Visit us in the Garden on June 1!

We at Urban Sprouts are super excited to offer you the chance to get to know us a bit better and experience the school garden this June!

Please join Urban Sprouts for our ‘Coffee & Kale’ Garden Brunch!

When: Sunday, June 1st, 10:30am to 12 noon
Where: Ida B. Wells High School, 1099 Hayes St. at Pierce, San Francisco
What:

• Tour the Ida B. Wells school garden
• Enjoy garden activities like seed saving, seed sowing and herb harvesting.
• Taste dishes made with organic school garden-grown ingredients, prepared by local chefs from Nopa Restaurant!
• Support our work by bringing friends and neighbors, and bring your checkbook! You will be invited to give - no gift is too large or too small. Every donation helps urban youth learn to grow their own food at school.

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO RSVP. If you can't make it to the event and you'd like to make a donation, click HERE.

Invitation (above and below) by Lisa Chen.

I hope to see you there!!