About the project
Global warming is demanding that humans acquire new consumption habits fast. Bed-Stuy Farm Share is a volunteer-run group working to make that happen by running a community supported agriculture (CSA) project in our neighborhood. We do extensive outreach and education in our neighborhood to ensure that people who are at greatest risk of diet related illness in our community have the knowledge and empowerment to join our CSA program and to support local growers through a seasonally-influenced diet. Time and time again, we are confronted with a critical problem: residents are mis-educated about diet and its relationships to health and are unexposed to local food growing and harvesting. Health professionals in our community have few resources and often the only diet-related educational material they have on hand is the USDA food pyramid. The USDA food pyramid is an inadequate and culturally irrelevant tool for educating Bed-Stuy residents about fresh produce, seasonal vegetables, and/or the importance of both of these things in a neighborhood with a diabetes epidemic.The Steps
The booklet text was already written by a coalition of gardeners, CSA organizers, market managers and health professionals through our local Central Brooklyn Task Force on Health & Fitness. This past December we won an award for Art Director Darhil Crooks of Esquire Magazine to do the design and layout work for the booklet. At this point we are doing final edits. And we need funding to print the guide. Once we have the funding to print the guide, we will print it and distribute it to local health professionals at our neighborhood hospitals and clinics, who have already agreed to make the guide available and use it in their practice. We will also distribute it to Parent Coordinators at our local schools. Distribution will go hand-in-hand with a presentation for parents at each school by one of our gardeners, market managers or CSA organizers.Why we‘re doing it
Bed-Stuy Farm Share, in collaboration with community gardeners and market managers, has produced a community health guide - Eating Healthy in Bed-Stuy - to serve as an educational tool and cross-promotional material for existing community food projects in Bed-Stuy. This guide will be a refreshing addition and replacement for out-dated and incomplete educational materials that our local health professionals can share with their clients. It includes an introduction to preventive health care with specifics on diabetes and heart disease; facts about the neighborhood; seasonal recipes; and information about all of the community food projects (gardens, CSAs, markets, and food cooperatives) located in Bed-Stuy.
