Today is World Food Day, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation's call to action to rally together to help the world achieve food security. That sounds like a big ask, but if we all do our part and look within our own community, it's a goal that’s achievable.

Believe it or not, sometimes the daunting challenges can provide incredible joy, as proven last weekend at the Harlem Children's Zone, where Former President Bill Clinton, Dr. Oz, Alan Houston and Rachael Ray all gathered just a few floors below our Good Food Garden on the rooftop to talk to parents about the importance of feeding kids foods that help them grow and thrive.  Kendra and I gathered on the rooftop in the garden with a team from Share Our Strength, Whole Foods, and Culinary Corps to teach kids about composting, root vegetables, and healthful eating habits. By the time the kids got to us, they were amped up on worm knowledge and the healthful harvest soup of Chef Ann Cooper, the Renegade Lunch Lady and happy, mostly, to taste carrots, beets, snap peas and snow peas. For those that weren’t, we had another trick up our sleeve. We let reluctant veggie eaters pull their own carrots fresh from the ground, which delivered an audible gasp from a crowd of 6-year-olds, who were more than happy to try our treats after that.

It’s one simple step, exposing kids to the kinds of foods that will support good health, in hopes to develop the taste and habit for making go-foods (fruits, vegetables, and whole grains) their go-to foods. But since it really starts with parents, I was honored to be asked to take the stage not long before Mr. Clinton, and speak to the them.

“We just pulled a carrot out of the ground on the rooftop in the middle of Harlem,” I said into the mic, which raised loud cheers and claps. I shared our message and mission about the good food gardens and I asked for the parents’ help. When I finished, and asked for questions, it seemed like half the hands in the room went up with questions about how they could start a garden on their rooftop, windowsill, or fire escape, and where to find more resources and support to feed their families better. It was chilling. There in just one room in one corner of the world were 400 dedicated, passionate parents, each eager and willing to do their part. Are you?

-Sarah Copeland, Good Food Ambassador

We did it!!!

On Saturday, the 10th of October, we unveiled yet another garden in New York City!  Our first rooftop garden is located at the Harlem Children's Zone on 125th St.

Sarah and I were there early with our friends from Share Our Strength, Teich Garden Systems, and Wholefoods.  As we were setting up for the kids, we all realized how fortunate we are to be part of such an inspiring and exciting initiative.  There is nothing like hanging out on a roof in Manhattan at 9am on a Saturday putting together veggie platters and compost bins!

While the Food & Wine Festival was happening downtown we were playing with worms and eating raw beets with children.  Too much fun!

More to come, so stay in touch!

Kendra

There’s a buzz in the air in downtown New York today, and I think it comes from all the green things growing in our Good Food Garden in the Meatpacking district as a part of the Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival.

Today, the festival gets underway in full swing as Food Network, Share Our Strength and the City of New York unveils Downtown Manhattan’s first Good Food Garden. The dandelion greens, cabbage and kale are all standing at attention on 9th avenue and 14th street, waiting to be admired by passers by. But despite its four-day stint as an exhibition garden, the real goal of these green goodies, like that all Good Food Gardens, is to bring nutritous, locally grown food to produce-poor neigborhoods in an effort to fight malnutrition. We’d like to help take this idea nation wide, but we’re starting right here in our own neighborhood in Chelsea. This garden will be donated to the Fulton House community projects up the street on 9th avenue after the event wraps. But for today, and through Sunday, it’s waiting for you to come take a peek, or a smell, or maybe if you’re really kind and say pretty please, take a taste. 

Thanks for all your support!

-Sarah Copeland, Good Food Ambassador

This week, my friends at Share Our Strength shared a beautiful speech by Wendell Berry, delivered recently to the Garden Club of America. His always poetic and poignant words seem to have the wisdom of ages, as well as the answer for today’s age. Here’s an excerpt from his speech that I couldn’t resist sharing with you:

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits. 

Many people suggest that the answer to the economic crises and America’s joblessness is retraining, and re-education. I can think of no better education, and no more befitting training for our time and age than that we receive in the garden. In the words of Mr. Berry, let’s go back to school.

-Sarah Copeland

Greetings!!!

I had the honor of visiting some very special friends at the Boys & Girls Club of Treasure Island on Labor Day!  Aliyah, Mariyah, and Sharongee accompanied Colleen into San Francisco for the Slow Food Eat In and then escorted me to their garden.  It was an exciting and heart warming few hours to say the least!

I hope you enjoy these photos.  I'm sure you can feel the enthusiasm of all the kids as they played amongst their blooming plants!

Warmly,
Kendra

Over the last two weeks, we've had so many exciting moments in the Good Food Gardens that the press picked up on it! First, we headed west to Altadena, California to build our first Good Food Garden with a Head Start school at the Arroyo Head Start. About sixty eager four-year-olds crowded into their new garden to plant along with Share Our Strength's founder Billy Shore and Jennie McCarthy, spokesperson for Weight Watchers who sponsored the garden. Access Hollywood came to see what the excitement was all about, and got some precious airtime with Jennie and the kids. I’ll be sure to let you know when that airs.

Here to tell us more about that experience is the Rise & Shine Mentor, Lottie Gatewood. Don't miss the link to the episode online, where you can see some of our Good Food Garden Ambassadors in action.

-Sarah

 Dear Ms. Sarah,

Our Rise & Shine Program has sure taken off. We hope you were able to watch NBC’s Nightly News last Thursday. We were featured in the Making a Difference segment. If you didn’t see us, here’s a link to our story and to the Web story on NBC’s Web site:

 We are now reaching 100 families at our distributions. We elected our officers and now each one of has a specific job. We manage everything from the budget, financials, purchasing, marketing, customer relations and of course, the garden!

It was exciting to have a national news team here interviewing us. It made all of us extremely proud of what we have been able to accomplish and what we are doing to help members of our community. Our goal is to be a model for communities around the country to replicate. We have the exposure NBC gave us will help move us in that direction.

We want to thank you and Share Our Strength again for supporting us and for allowing us to have the magnificent garden. We will all begin working with a professional horticulturalist in September so that we become even more familiar with gardening.

That’s all for now from your Rise & Shine Friends!

When we built our very first Good Food Garden, in San Francisco, we poured months of love and research and energy into the garden, but sadly, we never got to meet the kids who would give this garden a home. They live on Treasure Island, which is connected to San Francisco by a single bridge, a bridge that was blocked the day we planned to visit.

So, each month, I look forward to the letters and photos they send to Kendra, who started our Good Food Gardens Pen Pal Program, letters that give us a little insight into the life of our first garden, and the lives of the little ones who have made it their own. But still, I often feel like I'm missing the real picture, having never heard their little voices, or watched their curious fingers explore every green sprout the way I had with the kids in the other Good Food Garden we've built.

A few weeks ago, Kendra came into the kitchen with a box she received from Boys and Girls Club of Treasure Island, filled with their artistic offering of thanks. The whirl of the busy kitchen slowed to a halt as we stood and pulled out more than a dozen little paper plates, stapled together with drawings of the garden, with a yarn tail that held little pictures with words like "Seed," "Sprout" and "Plant," colored in carefully by tiny hands. As we pulled them out, one by one from behind the Styrofoam peanuts, I couldn't help but read each name carefully drawn in colored crayon aloud.  

Jada…Chloe….Vonya…Lakrista….Carolina.

Suddenly, these children became so much more to me than just our very first Good Food Gardeners, or pioneers in a pilot nutrition project. They are little people with names and stories and so much life ahead of them. They are kids who, who like every child, deserve to be surrounded by nourishing foods and experiences so they can live, learn, play and thrive and reach their fullest potential every day.

Thank you, dear reader, and Good Food Garden Ambassadors, for helping them get there.

-Sarah Copeland, Good Food Garden

Howdy Gardeners!

Last week when I returned from vacation, I had a brown package sitting on my chair.  When I saw it was sent from San Francisco I could feel the smile muscles in my face flex and felt as if it were Christmas in August!  I carefully opened the box only to find colorful, artistic gifts from the children of the Treasure Island Clubhouse.

I bounced around the office, sharing them with colleagues and then decided all employees at Food Network should see them.  Graciously, I was allowed to prop up a corkboard in our breakroom (which gets the most traffic) to hang them from!  Everyone has been complimenting the art and inquiring about the Good Food Garden's project. 

So happy to be involved and I hope you enjoy the photos we're sharing!

Warmly,
Kendra

In the midst of many harvest feasts this week, I read an alarming article in Chicago magazine that focused on the 609,034 Chicagoans that live in food deserts, defined as areas short on access to fresh meat and produce but ripe with convenience stores and fast food outlets. Of these households, 64,000 of them don't have a car to travel the average .59 miles to the nearest grocery store. Add to that the fact that 109,000 of the residents in food deserts are single mothers and you've got a recipe for food choices that are largely dependent on convenience.

The solutions suggested by many community leaders is three-fold: Access to better foods through new grocery stores, Education on eating healthfully, and Innovation, in the form of garden and nutrition education programs like Growing Home that host a weekly farm stand to grow the goods from their urban garden, and God's Gang's Planting Dreams program, that provides training in urban agriculture.

Thankfully, there are innovators all across the country working towards universal access to better food every day. Some of these innovators were recently awarded a Healthy Sprouts Award by KidGardening.org, and we applaud them for leading the way!

We're proud that the Good Food Gardens are playing a small role of the effort to feed America better, and we recognize that it takes every one of these innovating organizations working side by side to end childhood hunger and malnutrition. Every hungry mouth needs a willing hand to feed it. We welcome you to the conversation.  

-Sarah Copeland, Good Food Gardens

I love children's books. Good ones have inspired hundreds of kids to try something new, and many of them grow up to continue doing the things they dreamt and read about on those pages. In my case, it was Meet Molly, of the American Girl series, that first got me interested in gardening. Molly planted a Victory Garden (to help feed her family during the war), so I planted a Victory Garden. While my family never relied on it (thankfully, since I was also busy playing Marco Polo in the neighborhood pool and dressing up my baby brother like a girl), the gardening bug has stayed with me ever since. My favorite new children's book, The Curious Garden, is inspired by New York City's newly opened High line, a raised-track park full of good and green ideas that starts at Gansevoort and grows right past our kitchen windows up the West side toward 34th street. Other great gardening books aimed at kids, full of stories, edible education, scientific experiments and good old fashioned muddy fun, are highlighted in one of my favorite websites dedicated to and called Gardening With Kids. And of course, I can't forget my all-time favorite garden story, The Secret Garden, that not only helped me imagine the abandoned chicken coop on my grandparents farm as my own walled garden, but also encouraged my affection for skipping rope, British dialects and fashioning phrases like pride goeth before a fall into my 12-year-old vocabulary. As we gather more garden-inspired stories for our own Good Food Gardens Library, send us your favorites and what you love or loved about them.