Re: School Garden Committee - ideas

[david reed]

Jasmine et al,
Tx for a great wrap up of the conversation and thoughts. The Harvest Festival is a great idea, especially if we can get solid collaboration from Ag Extension and others.   And I look forward to the curriculum materials.

You mentioned school lunches, so I thought I would send out a piece I wrote recently after subbing at a rural elementary school.  I was really sad about the kind of food they were served, in spited of best efforts of SBAC.

-Dave

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Jasmine Samar Angelini-Knoll <jasmin...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all!

Thanks to Glen, Sarah, and Meg for coming out to the meeting yesterday evening, we had some great ideas going around that we're excited to develop with you all!

Here is my best summary of notes from the discussion:

1. The major item that we developed some ideas about was:

*Planning an event to promote public awareness of the value and potential of garden-based education!

To give us plenty of lead-time, we conceptualized this event as a Harvest Festival that would take place on a Saturday or Sunday in late October-- leaning towards a Sunday, the 23rd or the 30th.  We discussed Kanapaha Middle School (Sarah and Meg) as a potential host because they have a good space/facility for this type of community event.

The event would have a professional development component for teachers, in that we would invite teachers to participate in workshops/demo lessons in the morning on that day, and then a celebration/festive component in the afternoon, with the Harvest Festival that is open to the community, families and kids.  

Among the activities, we discussed the idea of holding state fair-type contests for the kids/schools for produce growing and food preparation (biggest pumpkin, best zucchini recipe, things like that).

We would also invite community groups/businesses related to food and farming to table and/or vend at the event.  Examples would be local farms and nurseries, Florida Organic Growers, Florida Gardening Club, etc.

So, things we need from y'all are:

*ideas for other fun & educational activities to happen during the festival

*community connections for people that would be interested in representing their organization/business at such an event

*connections of community members that might be able to lead/teach specific workshops for the teachers 

(Wendy Wilber at Extension and Jenny Seitz at Alachua County Waste Alternatives were mentioned as possible workshop leaders!)

*input on dates/days

*thoughts about advertising and ways to pay for printing publicity materials if we need to

*anything else you think could/should be included and/or that you would be interested in taking the lead on!

2. We also discussed helping to plan/support some version of the Garden and Bike Tour that happened in town last year, but with school gardens-- Meg thought we could break up the school gardens in town into regional areas (NW, NE, SW, SE) and then cover an area monthly (during peak growing times) with a tour.  This would probably directed to teachers and the families of schoolchildren in order to give those people ideas, inspiration, resources, etc. for their own schools!

3. Meg is/will be working on updating the school garden directory so that the info is accurate.

4. We just scratched the surface of a conversation about school foodservice, how to get more healthy and locally-produced food into schools... a big question with many components, and maybe more appropriate for the Policy Committee of GG, but perhaps if we can investigate the situation with foodservice contracts at some of the schools with gardens, we can work on a model/path of action to share with people who want to change how foodservice and food sourcing is done in schools... this will be an ongoing topic I'm sure!

5. Sarah and Meg are developing some curriculum materials based on their garden experience at Kanapaha and want to be able to share that with other teachers, before finalizing they want to have other teachers do some lesson testing and get feedback from them, during Fall 2011.

ETC.

*the problem of garden raiding came up... if anyone has ideas/resources on how to deal with produce being taken from school gardens, preventative and/or responsive action... let us know!

I think that's all for now-- send your thoughts/ideas about the Harvest Festival event, all connections are helpful, and we'll keep talking via email, and schedule another meeting as needed.

Thanks SO MUCH for your time and attention, and for all that you all do!

Have a beautiful week.

~jasmine

--
David Reed
cell 352-222-0651
home 352-336-0904