Greetings from the 7th Ward

Our friend Emily runs a garden in the 7th Ward. For last few Fridays the kids she works with cooked together and ate salad greens from our farm. 

They loved their salads so much they sent us these videos to thank us. Love it!

Class is in Session

This week have service learners in from Middlebury through InterVarsity and and a couple of folks from Tulane staying with us as part of a domestic study abroad trip. Today they were planting okra when our neighbor Stanley--a chef in New Orleans for 30+ years who also grew up farming--came by and taught us all how to prep the rows and give the seeds a head start. Stanley's a nice guy, but of course he also wants okra come summer! Seems like a pretty good deal all around.

workshop

Break growers into groups to look at each of these organizations and answer the following questions on large sheets of paper.

Questions for each group to answer:

1. Who are they? When did the organization start this work? Where do they work?

2. What do they do and how do they do it? What don’t they do? (Do they grow food? Work with youth? Train potential growers? Source food from local farmers? Change politic policies?)

3. How do they do their work? with who? for who?

4. What results have they achieved so far?

5. What overall impact are they having on food security?

6. Each grower should make a drawing of the group they are examining to show typical things that might be going on with that group.

Policy

Farm to School

http://www.farmtoschool.org/policies.php

Production

Polyface Farms in the Shenandoah Valley, VA

http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Good Food Revolution

Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

http://www.growingpower.org/

Food Justice

Immokalee Workers - Campaign for Fair Food in the Southeast

http://www.ciw-online.org/101.html#cff

Growing Growers

The University of Missoula at Montana Sustainable Food Systems Program

http://www.gardencityharvest.org/

Sustainable Community Development

Ma’O Organic Farms in Hawaii

http://www.maoorganicfarms.org/

                     Nuestras Raices in Holyoke, Massachusetts

http://www.nuestras-raices.org/en/home

Multinationals

http://www.sodexo.com/group_en/corporate-citizenship/home/better-tomorrow-plan.asp

Ask each group to present their findings

Questions after the groups have presented, use their drawings to answer the  questions:

1. How do different groups work to make food security a reality?

2. Are any of these parts of the work more important than others? how and why?

To answer question 3 they will have to draw what happens at OSBG

3. In comparison to these other groups from all across the country, to what extent do you think OSBG is doing good work? or, to put it a different way, is OSBG doing the work it’s going to take to make food security a reality in our community?

Eat, Drink, Grow Santa Fe Article on OSBG

http://eatsantafe.com/2012/12/school-blair-grocery/

Our School at Blair Grocery, by Gabriella Marks

[If you like to listen, "tune in" to hear Stacy Pearl and I talk the delicious decadence of NOLA and the rebirth of Blair Grocery on her KSFR Mouth of Wonder radio show]

My first visit to New Orleans’ notorious lower 9th Ward was in July, 2007. I’d been to New Orleans on a nearly annual pilgrimage for years prior, and never even really known that the NOLA version of a “burrough” is called a “ward”, let alone about the lower 9th.

Prior to Katrina, the lower 9th Ward was notable for the highest percentage of black home ownership in the city. But I think most of us learned about the lower 9th in the aftermath of The Storm – the district was flooded and devastated. In 2007, just 2 years short of the 2nd anniversary of Katrina, the area was almost completely erased and abandoned. Entire neighborhoods, the architecture that housed generations, and the families that lived there: all gone. Peering into every rusting carcass of a car, stepping over the shadow stains of floorplans rusted into concrete foundations, silenced beside the lone mailbox standing sentry over an empty lot, I was acutely aware of the absence of those lives: the sheer scale of it all was sobering.

On my recent (December, 2012) trip to NOLA, I found myself again driving through the lower 9th. There were fewer ruins, and even larger stretches of open land. Some of the houses that remained still bear the cryptic X-codes symbology of search and rescue reconnaissance – visual disaster vernacular writ large across the facade of each abandoned home. But this time I wasn’t there to witness devastation: I was there to see and taste first-hand the re-growth of a neighborhood.

By re-growth, I mean the literal greening and growing of food in a field. To my utter amazement and delight, my cousin, on break from college, is working at a place called Our School at Blair Grocery.

It’s the kind of project that can make you feel optimistic, even as you look past the planted field at condemned homes enclosed in boarded-up windows. I could wax endlessly operatic poetic about that farm. It’s one thing to have good ideas, and progressive conversations – the rhetorical search for solutions. It’s another thing entirely to smell the freshly composting soil and walk through vibrant verdant rows. At Blair Grocery, they’re growing change.

They have a mission that’s both simple and profound: “to what extent are we empowering at-risk youth to take leadership in making New Orleans, Louisiana the City that Ended Hunger?”

I can’t capture here everything they are doing towards answering this question, but programs include teaching local high school students about growing food, which is then sold locally at the growers market as well as to New Orleans’ restaurants like Cowbell and Cafe Carmo, eager to source local, organic, sustainable ingredients. College students from around the country intern at the farm: learning in the field, beyond books, about environmental justice, farming, community building. See? Pretty amazing.

Thanks, Jennifer, for introducing us to the farm. I spend a lot of time visiting and photographing rural farms throughout northern New Mexico. My first visit to a working urban farm brought real, grounded perspective to phrases like “sustainable” and “local food”: if you can do it in the lower 9th, we can do it anywhere.

Service Learning 2013!

Join us!

SERVICE LEARNING IN THE WINTER AND SPRING AT OUR SCHOOL AT BLAIR GROCERY

Do you sometimes feel like going to school is like living in a bubble? Do you want to burst the bubble and get out into the real world, get hands on experience working with real world issues? This winter and spring break Our School at Blair Grocery invites you to join us for a Domestic Study Abroad Trip working with local youth in New Orleans’  Lower Ninth Ward we are calling:
Taking it out of the classroom and into the garden: working towards AnOther America




Sample Itinerary





Day 1
Service learners arrive
Lunch
Welcome and Introduction
Tour of OSBG Site
Dinner
Workshop: Solidarity vs. Charity
Movie and debrief: Trouble the Water
Lights Out

Day 2
Breakfast
Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: Composting
City Tour
Lunch
Workshop: AnOther America

This workshop examines the extent of inequality and division in American society and, utilizing a systems thinking approach asks participants to theorize what its going to take to change it. (includes Derrick Jensen’s Star Wars)

Dinner
Documentary with debrief: Boys of Baraka  
Lights Out



Day 3
Breakfast
Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: Sprouts and Microgreens
Neighborhood Mini-tour: shopping at the corner store
Lunch
Workshop: Spotlight on Food Justice... Can we do justice just by growing food?

This workshop challenges us to analyze the broad spectrum of work being done by food justice organizations at the local and national level. (includes Francis Moore Lappe’s essay The City that Ended Hunger, Crimethinc’s Your Politics are Boring as F$@&))

Dinner
Documentary and Debrief: FRESH The Movie
Lights Out





Day 4
Breakfast
Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: Growing in raised beds
Lunch
Workshop: Where was the other 98.999% when we were
occupying wall street?

Given all that we have learned about the inequalities we face, this workshop examines the qualitative consequences of generations of division and the challenges they pose for Social Justice movement builders.

Dinner
Movie and Debrief: The Matrix and the Will to Believe
Lights Out

Day 5
Breakfast
Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms can save the world
Lunch
Workshop: Visioning a 100% New Orleans

This workshop challenges service learners to think beyond the fleeting rhetoric of New Orleans as one united Who Dat Nation and get into the substance of what a more just and more united New Orleans will look like. (includes the majority opinion from Plessy v. Ferguson 1896)

Dinner
Movie: V for Vendetta
Lights Out

Day 6
Breakfast

Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: Animal Husbandry
Lunch
Workshop: Lil’ Wayne and Garrison Keillor building the compost pile? What!? Why!?

This workshop looks at Urban Farming as a possible cornerstone in creating communities of action that matter to all of us. (includes theater of the oppressed)

Dinner
Debrief: The role of service learners in building a more just and civically engaged future, and imagining The Third Space
Lights Out

Day 7

Breakfast
Rotating Urban Farming Workshops in small groups: sale$ and marketing
Lunch
Workshop: Project Planning: Where do we go from here?

This workshop is an opportunity for participants to lay out a concrete action plan for when they return home or go back to school. Includes asset mapping, leveraging resources, mission/vision statements, and an action plan.

Dinner
Debrief: Reflecting on the experience and preparing to return to the bubble.
Lights Out

Day 8
Breakfast
Wrap Up
Participants Depart

The fee to participate in a trip is sliding scale from $100-$500 per person with group rates available. Food and lodging included.

To reserve a place for you or your group please click HERE! Download and complete the application, and then email it to Sam at sam@ny2no.org with 'Domestic Study Abroad' in the subject line.

Questions?

718-415-0890

turner@ny2no.org

Momentum

We haven't done a post in a while, but we have plenty of good reasons. Here's what we and our restaurant partners have been up to:

Cafe B: Coriantder seared scallops on grilled kale, with satsuma, shaved fennel and radish
salad topped with our sango radish sprouts

Ralph's on the Park: Cornmeal Fried Rabbit, Mexican Grits, Roasted Tomatillos,  Poblano Sauce and Rabbit Jus  topped with our Sunflower Sprouts

Earlier this week Carmo hosted a sugar cane pairing dinner and featured several of our products:

Salada Santa Teresa
Grape tomatoes, grilled frescal cheese, cucumbers, red onions and aromatic peppers,
served in a bib lettuce cup with cane vinegar dressing and our baby arugula

Sugar Cane-Smoked Marlin w/ Long-Cooked Collards with Cane Syrup
Jaggery Cupuaçu Scallop topped with our sango radish sprouts
Rum-Cured Cold-smoked Tuna topped with our sunflower sprouts

Sugar Cane-Smoked Local Organic Tofu w/ Long-Cooked Collards with Cane Syrup
Jaggery Cupuaçu OSBG Oyster Mushroom topped with our sango radish sprouts
Rum-Cured Young Coconut with Smoked Kombu and Dulse topped with our sunflower sprouts

Yes, you read right: we're growing oyster mushrooms! Sam, Oliver, and Turner have started to crank out mushrooms. This week we sold almost 15 pounds!

The most recent news is that Deronte, who's been a part of OSBG since before the beginning, is now working in the kitchen of one of our newest restaurant partners: Commander's Palace! We've been raving about Deronte's cooking for years now, so it's no surprise to us. He'll be studying culinary arts next semester (along with two other majors!) at Dillard. So excited for him and for any one lucky enough to eat his food.

Feelings Cafe

One of our newest partners is a romantic cafe in a classic New Orleans setting. Feelings Cafe (which shares the building with another of our partners: Sentiments), is a hop, skip, and a jump away from the French Quarter--2600 Chartres Street--and, frankly, feels more like what the French Quarter was and should be than 99% of the Quarter. A welcome escape for locals and tourists alike. Oh, and did we mention the food?:

chicken carbonara.

veal piccatta

veloute of catfish and brie

marinated mirliton and crab salad over arugula with fire roasted corn

The recently departed arugula and duck comfit salad with candied ginger, toasted seeds, and a roast butternut dressing. Bring it back!