Summer of Solutions Hartford
A youth-leadership and food-justice summer program that creates opportunities for youth ages 14-30 to work in school and community gardens, community outreach and organizing, and educational and cultural programming.
Leader
Jennifer Roach
Location
Zion St Hartford, CT 06106
Impact areas
About the project
Summer of Solutions Hartford is a youth leadership development and food justice summer program for people ages 14-30. This summer our team of 20
young people learned leadership skills, urban farming, personal sustainability, community organizing, and social entrepreneurship through
formal training and hands-on learning! Each participant dedicated 20 hours per week to one of the projects outlined below:
1. El Jardin de Zion Street: Summer of Solutions Hartford is worked with members of the Frog Hollow and Somali-Bantu refugee communities to
re-open El Jardin de Zion Street for its second year. The garden offers plots to members to grow vegetables for their own use, and participants
were responsible for building plots, providing seeds, managing the garden and helping with upkeep.
2. The Annie Fisher Montessori School Garden: Summer of Solutions Hartford partnered with a local Montessori magnet school to help them with
their new school garden. Our program’s participants cultivated the garden over the summer, organized an educational curriculum for summer school
students and conducted an outreach campaign to involve the surrounding neighborhood.
3. Broad Street Community Garden: Summer of Solutions participants worked with Trinity College to construct a new community garden on Broad
Street in Frog Hollow and to make garden beds available to Trinity's neighbors.
4. Burns Elementary School Garden: Summer of Solutions Hartford participants worked with Frog Hollow's Burns Elementary School staff and
students to build and plant a school garden and an outdoor garden classroom and provided hands-on education opportunities for students through
gardening classes at the COMPASS after school program.
The Steps
Offer opportunities and support for 20 youth ages 14-30 to work full-time in local food justice efforts
Offer a week of leadership and skills training to full-time and part-time participants
Work with our 4 partner organizations to plan summer work projects for teams of 4-8 participants
Work in teams with partner organizations throughout the summer to construct and manage two school gardens and two community gardens, conduct community
outreach efforts and organize community events and programs
Invite local experts and organizations to offer leadership and skills training to participants and community members throughout the summer,
including healthy eating, nutrition, personal sustainability, and urban farming.
Now we have built 4 gardens and our participants left the program with all the skills and experience they need to help build a healthy urban food
system in Hartford.
Why we‘re doing it
According to the Hartford Health Survey of 2006, 17% of Hartford residents have diabetes, 12% have heart disease, and 30% have hypertension, which
correlate with unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle. Many factors limit residents’ access to healthy food and recreation. Many residents don’t have
cars and cannot access the produce at Stop & Shop, the only large grocery store in the city. Given that so many people are living below or just over
the poverty level, affordable and healthy food is often out of reach.
Local food systems provide important jobs, increase biodiversity, create pollinator habitats, establish safe green space for recreation, keep money
in the community, honor agricultural traditions, and offer nutritious wholesome foods that keep people healthy.
This summer we expanded the local food options available in Hartford by building two community gardens on Zion St and Broad St and two school
gardens at the Annie Fisher Montessori School and Burns Elementary School. Through these gardens, we engaged hundreds of community members in local
food production and healthy eating. We are using these exciting project opportunities to train 25 young people (75% of whom are from Hartford) in
urban agriculture and community organizing. When participants left our program, they had all the skills they needed to become agents of change in
our food system, including community organizing, media, gardening, cooking, nutrition, resource generation, leadership, and much more!