SUCCESS STORY VEGETABLE GARDENS 15

VEGETABLE GARDENS - Edible Schoolyard NYC

SUCCESS STORY

TKWB

Technique:VEGETABLE GARDENS Project:Edible Schoolyard NYC Site:New York, USA Location Click the globe to see the technique on Google Earth Continent: North America Country: United States of America Site: Brooklyn, New York Coordinates: Lat.: 40.69 Long.: 73.99 Brief introduction The first schoolyard vegetable garden inspired in Alice Waters’ Californian project has been built in Brooklyn. The aim was to combat the alarming child obesity rates in the city of New York by teaching the pupils healthier eating habits, making them participants in a playful and educational way in the process of harvesting their own fruit and vegetables and cooking and eating them together. Problems, causes and effects Approximately 40% of the pupils in New York’s state schools are obese or overweight. Only 14% of the children eat the recommended daily portion of fruit and only 20% eat their portion of vegetables. These data are significantly worse in communities with fewer financial resources. Because of child obesity, the United States has given birth to the first generation with a lower life expectancy than its parents. Solutions/Project description To remedy this situation, the non-profit organization Edible Schoolyard NYC (ESYNYC) began in 2010 to build vegetable gardens and to impart cookery lessons in the city’s state schools, exporting the project created by Alice Waters in 1995 in Berkeley, California. This activist was a pioneer in maintaining that schools were the best place for educating children in healthy eating habits and in raising environmental awareness and that it was therefore necessary for schoolyards to have a vegetable garden tended by the children themselves. It was in Public School 216, in Brooklyn, where the first edible schoolyard and kitchen classroom was installed, designed by the architects of WORKac. The kitchen is fitted out to enable 30 pupils to cook and eat fresh produce from the eco-friendly vegetable patch. On one side of the kitchen is the greenhouse, where the crops are protected during the coldest months. On the other side are solar panels, a rainwater collection tank, a chicken run, space for storing the tools and a composting corner. ESYNYC is in charge of providing a multidisciplinary and experimental curricular programme for teachers and pupils and also designs proposals and activities for the families, thus opening up the garden to the community. The organization sends in gardening and cookery professionals to impart classes in the school, during which the students prepare their recipes and eat them together. The surplus produced in the vegetable garden is sold by the pupils themselves after school. Conclusions The initiative not only offers the children and their families the opportunity of coming into contact with fresh and varied produce and of acquiring knowledge on food that they would not otherwise have; it also has the vocation of changing this generation’s eating habits and reversing an alarming trend. This is why a vegetable garden has recently been built in Public School 7 of Harlem in NY. This is one of the city’s poorest boroughs, with the highest obesity and malnutrition rates and with the fewest green spaces in the city. The project does not end in Harlem, as in future the plan is to have at least one vegetable garden for each one of the city’s five districts. The ESYNYC organization has launched a pilot training programme comprised of 100 educators working with 35,000 children from all over the city on different healthy eating projects. Images   TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUE DATA Technique VEGETABLE GARDENS Icon Cathegory B - Agriculture Identification code B6 Other Success stories RELATED TECHNIQUES Author: Susanne Strum [Author of the form: Alanna Gerardi] Reference: http://fad.cat/citytocity/5/en/?cat=10 DeepeningDownload PDF