August Updates from Urban Roots!
“Bees do have a smell you know, and they should, for their feet are dusted with the spices of a million flowers”
-Ray Bradbury
In the blink of an eye, our 2020 Summer Season is coming to a close. I am incredibly proud of how our youth and staff have pivoted this year to adapt to an extraordinary set of circumstances. Although we may have had some bumps along the way, the tenacity of our team became apparent and Urban Roots has stood strong, ready to serve our youth and our community on the East Side.
This summer we have employed 70 youth interns and 8 youth alumni staff members. The majority of our youth participated in virtual work shifts combining Zoom meetings with guided learning kits to add hands on activities and lessons in Google Classroom. Those who returned to work onsite at Urban Roots did so with enhanced safety precautions, PPE, and small work crews to allow for social distancing. All youth and alumni were invited every single week to a fresh produce and essential supply giveaway where we redistributed our produce typically sold through other outlets, to our youth and their families. We also used additional funds to purchase food from local BIPOC farmers to supplement the food from our urban farms.
We look forward to fall where there are plenty of fun, new ways to stay involved with Urban Roots. We’ve added an additional Fall CSA share and a highly anticipated Take Home Pizza Night (more details to come). We are very excited for our virtual fundraiser event in October with an online auction and variety show themed entertainment. Although we will miss connecting with our supporters in person at our usual gathering, we promise this will be a fun and engaging online event…you won’t want to miss it!
Thank you for staying connected with Urban Roots this season, your engagement is important as we continue our vital programming in 2020.
Stay well,
Hayley Ball
Executive Director
Youth Summer Program Updates
Conservation Program: The Conservation Crew has been working hard this summer to protect our parks! Each week they have done a tremendous job battling invasive species while deepening their understanding of the natural world. Interns have collected macro-invertebrates living in the waters of Trout Brook Nature Sanctuary to gauge the health of the water and to test the dissolved oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus levels. This ongoing work has connected Conservation youth with staff from the Capital Region Watershed District (CRWD) to engage in monitoring, sampling, and learn about jobs in the field of water conservation. Interns also learned about the importance of pollinators and the basics of bumble identification. They conducted a pollinator survey at Trout Brook, finding a decent diversity of bumblebees, various bee species and some wacky looking wasps!
We are also working with another 50 youth in an Urban Roots online program this summer. Those youth received an activity kit full of materials that each week they utilize to do activities and experiments at home to better understand the Conservation, Cook Fresh and Market Garden programs. For Conservation, these youth have visited parks and learned to identify trees, used a plant press to make flower art, and have adopted and cleaned out storm drains in their neighborhoods. As the summer program comes to an end, we are looking at ways to engage in our parks with youth this fall with a hybrid model of in person and distance work.
Market Garden Program:
August has brought with it a plentiful bounty of summer produce. This week our CSA box included many varieties of tomatoes, peppers and eggplant!
This is the special time of the year when we find ourselves simply trying to keep up with the abundance of fresh produce ripening on the vine.
Fall storage crops are ripening in the fields! Potatoes, onions and shallots are coming out of the ground and being cured for long-term storage. Apples are blushing in our orchard and the winter squash patch is bursting at the seams!
We’ve been supplying our weekly Intern Essential Supply Giveaways with produce each week, as well as bringing a lot of extra produce to CLUES (Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio) on East 7th Street where they also serve the East Side of Saint Paul with food relief mutual aid.
Our cheese CSA partnership with Alemar Cheese has been a hit! We’ve been having so much fun with it that we’re also putting together a 6-week CSA coffee add-on with True Stone Coffee Roasters. They roast their coffee right here in Saint Paul.
Want in on our CSA? We are opening up spots for a Fall CSA Share that will be available through our online shop. If you’re interested, keep an eye out for it on our website and via social media. We are also working hard to become registered to accept EBT as a form of payment for CSA’s. We are very eager to make our produce available and accessible to even more people in the Twin Cities.
Our community garden is gaining momentum and we are, as per usual, very impressed with the skill and attention our neighbors at the new Rivoli Bluff Community Garden bring to their gardens. We’ve been having a lot of fun checking in on the progress of their vegetables and trading produce here and there. There is so much agricultural knowledge within our community- it’s amazing what folks can do when they have the space to put their skills to use.
Cook Fresh Program: Cook Fresh has been stirring up a lot of new things this season. We can’t believe it’s already the end of summer programming – there are many cool projects we’ve done and projects that are still on-going!
With the new micro kitchen build out that happened earlier this season, we were able to continue connecting through food by cooking up culturally specific and nutritious meals (with the leadership of our Cook Fresh interns) and discuss those recipes and traditions over virtual lessons. Since the interns have been learning from our public health college interns from the University of Minnesota, they have been able to do nutritional analysis of the foods they cook and have been incorporating that knowledge into their cooking.
The Cook Fresh program is also doing community classes with our collaborative partners East Side Table and the American Indian Family Center. Program manager Saba is doing bi-weekly cooking demos on the East Side Table facebook page. We have had over 5,000 engagements and the best part is, when you watch the videos on FB live you learn a lot of fun kitchen hacks, seasonal recipes, and are entered into a raffle to win a gift card or a kitchen tool! These have been super fun and we recommend tuning in through December! With the American Indian Family Center, we’ve been doing cooking classes and round table food talks online. Cook Fresh is also going to work with CLUES (Comunidades Latinas Unidos en Servicio) and do co-created cooking classes that will highlight the produce grown in the community garden space designed with our garden interns located at CLUES office site in East Saint Paul.
Save the Date for our Virtual Event!
We’re shaking things up in 2020 with our annual fundraising event…we are going virtual! We have teamed up with two-time James Beard award winning production company, The Perennial Plate to film and produce our virtual program! It will be a fun, variety show theme in which you will learn cool things and learn about what we do!
Our guests include writer & chef and role model for our youth, Samin Nosrat, environmentalist and activist, Winona LaDuke and Twin Cities Hmong American chef Yia Vang and his mom, along with many appearances by the amazing youth interns that make our programs vibrant and meaningful. Our auction will open online on October 13, followed by two evenings of programming, concluding with a live fundraiser to take your contributions to keep Urban Roots thriving. Registration and more information coming soon!
