Can We Resurrect Urban Youth Growers? 
The Urban Youth Growers is an exciting and integral program designed to empower youth in the Holland community with summer employment and hands-on learning at Eighth Day Farm in collaboration with Escape Career Connections.
If this initiative gains the necessary funding ($8,000-$13,000), Urban Youth Growers will give four to eight youth meaningful work within Eighth Day Farm – planting tomatoes, weeding around swiss chard, tending bell peppers, harvesting kohlrabi, helping at our Holland Farmers Market stand and our CSA distributions. Beyond just work, youth will engage in a curriculum of sustainable agriculture and have weekly discussions on social justice, personal growth, and food science.
Most of our community’s youth only know the food as it appears at the grocery store. Their summers are a gap in education and consist more of social media and video games than meaningful interaction with community, with nature, and with themselves. Through hard work, hard-earned money, relevant and hand-on learning, community engagement, and most of all, sincere relationships with peers, team leader, and Eighth Day Farms interns, Urban Youth Growers could make a difference for the youth who participate as well those who interact with them. By earning a fair wage for their work, teens discover their worth as a person, can help their families, are taught and empowered to make sound financial decisions, and learn the value of hard work. What an opportunity!
Urban Youth Growers was piloted at Eighth Day Farms in 2014, but was not sustained. In a separate partnership, since 2015, Escape Career Connections has been able to provide Eighth Day Farms with a work crew during the summer through the generosity of private donors However, the youth only worked in the field and did not have the opportunity to learn the science and broader importance of sustainable agriculture, nor experience the community and business side of the CSA and Farmers Market. We want to empower our youth and connect them to their community and to their own worth. That is why Escape and Eighth Day Farms are partnering to bring back Urban Youth Growers, a more integral, intentional, and empowering way to connect Holland’s diverse youth with the roots of their food and their community. Your gift of $120 sponsors one youth for one week in the program! A $1200 gift sponsors one youth for the whole summer. This program would function best with four to eight youth, with an adult team leader. $8,000 would allow this program to benefit 4 young people, and $13,000 would allow us to expand it to 8 youth, but it doesn’t happen without your help! Send your tax-deductible donation to Eighth Day Farm, a registered 501(c)3 by check or online via PayPal (see below). Help us work for justice and goodness in the lives of our young people and in the soil of our city, today and for the future!
Please write ‘YOUTH GROWERS’ in the memo line (or special instructions) to designate your gift to this program.
Checks:
Eighth Day Farm
709 Pine Avenue
Holland, MI 49423
Online:
In hope and in gratitude.
Eighth Day Farm, Escape Ministries, and the youth of Holland
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