NorthWest Initiative – Food Systems Project – Summer Garden Camp

Written by: NorthWest Initiative

The Food Systems Project offers four summer camps free to the school communities each and every summer. Camp duration is three hours per day, three days a week, for three weeks. Campers learn a new healthy recipe each day in addition to testing fun flavors at the fruit smoothie station. Campers also care for the garden (weed and water), track plant growth, and are taught a new garden lesson each day. Exercise is also incorporated in our daily routine – be it relay races, bean races, yoga, aerobics, or simply playing hard at the playground. 

Students also harvest produce from the school gardens to sell at a youth farm stand. The stand made more than $300 last year, and all excess produce was donated to low income senior apartments. This summer, the School Garden-Based Nutrition Education program plans to participate in the new Westside Farmer’s Market, with plans to donate excess produce to the Greater Lansing Food Bank to distribute to low-income families. 

The goal of our program is to increase fruit and vegetable consumption. Last year we saw a 46 percent increase in vegetable consumption and a 17 percent increase in fruit consumption according to pre and post parent surveys. Food Systems Project feels our “seed to plate” format to be the main contributor to our success; as students will eat what they worked hard to grow.

Staffing and food sampling costs are provided by the Michigan Nutrition Network. All garden costs are paid via community and partner donations.

If you would like to learn more about the Food Systems Project School Garden-Based Nutrition Education Program; contact Joy Baldwin at (517) 999-2894; joy@nwlansing.org; or visit www.nwlansing.org/fspschoolgardens.html.

STEM and Service-Learning

Written by: Bob Seidel & Kate Shatzkin from the National Summer Learning Association

Studies estimate that nearly 80 percent of future careers will require awareness of and facility with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). But American students are behind their peers in other countries in these subjects, and afterschool and summer learning programs are striving to be part of the solution. Because they do not face all of the constraints of the regular school day and year, afterschool and summer learning programs often have greater flexibility to allow students to learn through practical activities in their communities, including service-learning projects.

The National Summer Learning Association, the Afterschool Alliance, and the National AfterSchool Association have joined forces to make 2011 the “Year of Science” for afterschool and summer learning programs. Our goal is both to communicate the benefits of the unique settings and hands-on projects these programs can provide to spark students’ interest in STEM subjects, and to help equip the field with the resources it needs to fully engage youth beyond the school day.

Many summer and afterschool programs already play a major role in engaging students in STEM through hands-on, project-based learning that complements traditional school day learning. STEM is really about the ability to understand our world, about problem-solving, about inventing something new. Summer programs can take advantage of exciting natural laboratories, whether it’s a bay where students can test water quality or a community garden where students can organize neighbors while studying plant genetics.

Increasingly, summer and afterschool STEM learning are seen not just as a nice add-on, but a critical component in development of these skills for American youth. In a recent article in American Scientist magazine (http://caise.insci.org/uploads/docs/FalkandDierking95perc.pdf), Oregon State University researchers John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking wrote that “an ever-growing body of evidence demonstrates that most science is learned outside of school.” The researchers also noted that a 2009 report on informal science learning environments by the National Research Council found that “not only do free-choice science learning experiences jump-start a child’s long-term interest in science topics, they also can significantly improve science understanding among populations typically underrepresented in science.”

To harness their full potential to contribute to the STEM learning movement, though, those who run afterschool and summer learning programs say they need not just training and money, but mentors who can show young people what science and math will allow them to do in life. Engaging older students and adults as STEM mentors, during both the school year and the summer, is another exciting way to link the movements promoting high-quality service-learning and out-of-school-time learning.

For more information, visit the websites of the Afterschool Alliance (www.afterschoolalliance.org), the National AfterSchool Association (www.naaweb.org), and the National Summer Learning Association (www.summerlearning.org).

Bob is policy director of the National Summer Learning Association and a member of the Service-Learning United leadership team. Kate is marketing and communications director of the National Summer Learning Association. For more information, contact Bob at bseidel@summerlearning.org.

Service Learning: A Civic Education

Written by: Jaymes Pyne, Assistant Director in the Community Outreach Office at Grand Valley State University’s College of Education

Last week I attended a Learn and Serve - Michigan Service Learning Sustainability Symposium with some colleagues. The Symposium was intended for K-12 educators and service learning coordinators, but I was ecstatic to go as a representative from higher education because there was so much great information getting spread around!

Besides, my colleagues and I thought collaborating with teachers in the trenches would also help inform our work with teachers on environmental service learning though the Groundswell initiative and various College of Education service-learning initiatives.

Facilitating the symposium were Traci and Matt from KIDS Consortium, a Maine-based organization promoting an award-winning model for service learning education. Over the course of two full workshop days, Matt and Traci worked with school district teams to develop action plans for educating others in their district and sustaining a service learning program for years to come. The diversity and knowledge coming from these districts is impressive, to say the least, and I witnessed the beginnings of some fantastic models for institutionalized service learning.

But I want to take this time to share all the wonderful resources that KIDS Consortium has to offer. Through games and organized guides, KIDS makes it easy for professionals new to service learning to get the basic principles:

The What Is It? Game – I find that the greatest challenge when working with college students and education professionals new to service learning is just agreeing on what service learning is! So many times there is a misconception that community service and service learning are synonymous. Not so! The What Is It? Game provides specific scenarios of students doing either community-based service, community service, or service learning, and asks the participants to place each scenario into one of those three definitions. Through this process, participants get to process these fundamentally different service experiences and get to the heart of what service learning actually is.

Working with KIDS - Sometimes all you need is a simple walkthrough of the steps of service learning. This textbook offers a well-organized and comprehensive strategy for planning and implementing service learning with a class of students. It covers the process of service learning and provides examples of great projects, how to work together with students on planning and implementing a youth-driven project, and how to sustain project partnerships with community organizations.

Free Project resources - Take some time to see what KIDS has on their website, whether you're starting from the perspective of service or content area.

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Better yet, if you have the chance to attend a KIDS event, do it! You will not be sorry. I should insert here that I have no affiliation whatsoever with KIDS Consortium; I just love their stuff!

As a final note, it must be stated that Learn & Serve knows how to put on a symposium. We spent the 2 1/2 days at the beautiful Shanty Creek Resort, where there was even one night of snow tubing. Yes, you should have seen the operators' faces as an army of wool jackets and dress shoes marched up the hill on a blustery 12 degree winter evening, racing down the hill in tubes without a second thought! The picture below is of myself (middle) and two of my colleagues who also attended the symposium.

This blog was originally posted at http://colleaguesplus.com/. To view more blogs written by Jaymes Pyne, click here: http://colleaguesplus.com/blogs/pyne.

“We’re Making the Change, What About You?”

Have you recently visited the Michigan Community Service Commission’s YouTube Channel? Find out how members of the 2010-2011 Service-Learning Youth Council (SLYC) are “Making the Change” in their communities.

Visit http://www.youtube.com/mcsconline to see more videos from our Service-Learning Youth Council members.

The Youth Senate Expands its Philanthropic Efforts for the Impoverished

Written by: Members of the Youth Senate, a Program of the Youth Empowerment Project at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor

Over the last five years, the Youth Senate has focused on raising awareness in their schools and communities about global poverty issues. The Fight Poverty in Africa Project is the primary example of their efforts.

This year, the Action Senate at Pioneer High School has decided to interface their prior work from the Africa Project with an in-depth look at local poverty, particularly how it effects youth and the rates of homelessness. Pioneer students are preparing to give an interactive classroom presentation on the impact of poverty on the people in our local community. Huron is continuing to use the Africa Project framework to increase awareness of youth in poverty among African nations and will do similar classroom presentations.

The students believe in a form of grassroots campaigning that is more effective than simply broadcasting a message across the P.A. They believe that by going from class to class, although this is tedious, they will be able to most effectively convey the message and urgency of the fight against local poverty. This is because the level of interaction that comes out of an in-class presentation is far greater because the presenters and audience are peers. The presenters are there to answer questions, to explain confusing details, or to simply show the audience that they themselves have dedicated this time and effort to an important cause. For these reasons, the in-class presentations have always been a tradition of the Youth Action Senate’s fight against poverty campaigns.

Pioneer students this year have decided to shift the focus from Africa to Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County because they believe students will be able to relate easier to things that happen close to their homes, as opposed to a continent on the other side of the world. Furthermore, the majority of the high school population is presumably unaware of the severity of the poverty issue in the greater Ann Arbor area. The Youth Action Senate at Pioneer believes students will be able to make a more effective contribution to solving these problems if they are more educated and informed about them in both local and global terms.

In order to best serve the needs of the community, it is necessary to get a first-hand look at poverty and how others around the city are helping to fight it. The students are now also using the Youth Action Senate to organize volunteer opportunities for themselves. They have already spent the past two Saturdays remodeling homes with the Habitat for Humanity of Huron Valley and will help distribute food and winter clothing to the homeless each Friday night. Volunteering events are being set up and listed on our homepage at www.youthempowerment.com. All students are welcome to sign up for any volunteer opportunities they are interested in.

For more information about the Youth Empowerment Project, click here: http://www.youthempowerment.com/