Partnering for a Healthy Generation

By: Diana K. Rice, Sustainable Jersey City, “Good Food Now!” Project Lead
…..Debra A. Italiano, Sustainable Jersey City, Chair

Two hundred and forty two school gardens presently enrich schools throughout New Jersey – and this number grows every year. These gardens are an essential part of Farm to School education, providing students with the opportunity to witness firsthand the ways in which fresh, nutritious fruits and vegetables find their way from the soil to their plates. Beyond simply providing a platform for nutrition education, gardens also allow students access to invaluable opportunities in team building and learning to be responsible members of their communities – skills that many innovative schools are beginning to emphasize just as much as math and reading.

We should meet every opportunity for New Jersey schools to cultivate new school gardens with enthusiasm and support, but the reality is that on-site gardens are not a possibility for many of New Jersey’s 2,500+ public schools. Quality gardens require space, funding, and maintenance labor; many New Jersey schools are simply not in a place to tackle such a project on top of all of their other daily challenges. In schools fortunate enough to have a garden in place, it takes special effort to ensure that spring’s planting efforts don’t transform into a tangled mess of weeds and overgrown plants by the time students return to school in the fall due to neglect over the summer.

And in urban areas such as Jersey City, where ample space and funds are hard to come by for nearly any type of project, the challenges of implementing an on-site garden can be even greater, case in point – Bright Street Academy in downtown Jersey City. Reed Leibfreid, the school’s principal, concedes, “Since we can’t have a garden on the premises, I am so thankful to be able to work with community partners that can provide the kids with field experiences to learn, in this instance at Bright Street Community Garden.”

It so happens that many urban community members – adults and children alike – are also increasingly anxious for the sort of tangible gardening experiences that apartment and rowhouse living often preclude. The same folks who support CSAs and farmers markets as ways to decrease the degree of separation between the farm and their forks are hungry to take a stab at growing their own. On top of growing food, these initiatives are establishing vibrant green spaces across cities that also provide opportunities to interact with nature and encourage community collaboration where it didn’t exist before.

“This has been a love project for the community,” says Pat Byrne, a Jersey City-based freelancer and musician who pushed for over two years for the developer who owns a vacant lot adjacent to his apartment building on Bright Street to allow the space to become a community garden. Named for Teresa Lugo, Byrne’s neighbor and fellow gardening enthusiast, the Teresa Lugo Bright Street Community Garden celebrated its dedication this past August. Bright Street Academy, located just next door, has already seized the opportunity to let its students get their hands dirty.

“I learned how to make compost, as well as test different types of plants for taste and texture,” says ninth grade Bright Street Academy student Ian Hosie. “It’s a nice experience to meet with people around your neighborhood who have the same interests as you.”

That’s exactly the experience that Bright Street Academy principal Reed Leibfreid was hoping his student would have – this alternative public school uses the “community school” model of creating partnerships with local organizations to both provide experiential learning activities and to allow students like Ian to make meaningful contributions to their communities. By incorporating programs such as Sustainable Jersey City’s Youth Neighborhood Ambassador Program – a green civics leadership program already in place at the nearby Boys and Girls Club – into the school’s after school field visits schedule, Leibfried hopes to help cultivate a generation of future leaders with not only practical sustainable living skills, but the enthusiasm, passion, and connections needed to drive the city towards a greener and healthier future.

Presently, opportunities to serve in the Bright Street Garden serve as incentives Bright Street Academy’s students must earn though good grades and behavior, but if the efforts of Elizabeth Onorato and Geoff Allen at the Blossoming Ivy Community Garden, located in the Greenville section of Jersey City, are any example, community gardens can serve as learning grounds for each and every student. Part of Jersey City’s innovative Adopt-A-Lot program, the Blossoming Ivy Community Garden began when the Hudson County Chapter of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority signed a two-year lease with the city for just $1. As local volunteers who wanted to support the initiative, Onorato and Allen became the defacto garden stewards, and sure enough, students from the neighboring Fred W. Martin #41 school and Whitney M. Young Jr. #15 school began to get involved with activities at the garden.

“Parents used to drop their kids off, but now they stay and work together with the kids on the weekends,” says Allen, who is a professional property manager and grew up in the neighborhood. They’ve worked hard to clear the lot and design the garden space. In fact, their efforts even led to the garden receiving a ‘Most Sustainable’ award from the city’s Adopt-a-Lot program for its re-invention of found and second hand materials to build the garden, as they had no budget to get things started.

These stewards are proud that the garden provides students from ages 6 to 14 with the opportunity to experience the full growing and harvesting season that they likely wouldn’t be witness to in a school garden. This year, they’ve grown summer staples such as watermelons, cucumbers, tomatoes and collard greens alongside decorative non-edibles such as black eyed susans, tulips and sunflowers. “Fall is about harvesting and mulching, turning soil with compost and planting bulbs” says Allen.

Presently, students’ participation with the Blossoming Ivy garden is largely unstructured, although they do receive community service hours for the time they spend there.

Still, Onorato and Allen see potential for structured after school activities and leadership initiatives to take place in the garden. Right now, some of the kids from the Saturday morning bowling league Allen also manages clamor to get to the garden for the 11 – 3 pm work sessions that have been structured for the community. According to Geoff Allen, “It would be great if there were more opportunities like this for kids across the city. It brings them into a whole new world – they just love it.”

 

 

 

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