Autumn Updates from Urban Roots
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
-LM Montgomery
Dear Friends of Urban Roots,
Another summer flew by and it was our biggest one yet! 70 youth joined us this summer engaging in paid internships, either virtually or in-person, and we employed 6 phenomenal high-school grads as alumni staff members. We had a record-breaking year for pounds of produce grown, allowing us to reach deep into our community as access to food reached a crisis level. We are so grateful for the opportunity to serve our community in meaningful ways at a time that continues to have so much uncertainty. However, we need your support to help us continue to adapt to the needs of the community and to support youth as they navigate this challenging academic year.
We are so pleased to present, “Not Your Garden Variety Show,” a Virtual Fundraising Event to celebrate Urban Roots. Join us on October 13 & 14 as our online auction, launches, spiced-up with fun cocktail/mocktail and cooking demonstrations so you can gather friends and family for a pre-show happy hour and celebrate the main event on October 15 in style! Filmed by the two-time James Beard award-winning production company, The Perennial Plate, the video features chef and writer Samin Nosrat, environmentalist Winona LaDuke, local musician Lucy Michelle, Chef Yia Vang and Mama Vang, and queen-bee Erin Rupp of Pollinate Minnesota.
Your support during our virtual fundraiser is critical to the success of our youth interns and their futures. Help us continue to create opportunities for youth on the East Side of Saint Paul. I sincerely hope you’ll join us and I look forward to “seeing” you on October 15!
Fall Youth Internship Programs are on!
Cook Fresh Program: As the summer session came to a close, we reflected with the interns on all that we learned together. The interns enjoyed the balance of working from home and our live outdoor nutrition and cooking labs! Our partnership with the University of Minnesota’s MPH program highlighted how fun, active, and culturally relevant nutrition lessons could be. Our chef partners made cooking at home for Cook Fresh interns a relatable and tasty experience! Sean Sherman, Lachelle Cunningham, Les Dames d’Escoffier, Heather Janz and so many more incredible chefs enriched our summer cooking lessons with their support and creative virtual recipes they shared with our interns! And finally, our Food & Essential Supplies giveaway was a direct response to our community. We partnered with our favorite BIPOC owned and operated farms to create produce boxes to send home with the Urban Roots interns! Our community came together strong and this summer felt like an incredibly special time. Thanks to everyone who helped make it one for the books.
It’s a new season and while Cook Fresh is always up to something delicious, fall brings in new recipes, new lessons, more events, and new partnerships! We’ve moved our kitchen equipment to our backyard so that the interns each have an outdoor cooking station where they can make tasty recipes. We’re excited to try out the new preserve recipes-tomato and plum jams along with apple butter, yum! We’ll also be working on cooking labs at home and partner with chefs to keep those cooking lessons exciting and dynamic. Interns will record some of their favorite recipes that they make, so keep your eyes peeled for those posts!
Cook Fresh has some incredible partnerships and new projects underway.
Urban Roots and CLUES (Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio) are midway into a workshop series, celebrating cooking, and highlighting fall gardening and composting. This week we made a tasty pico de gallo, carnitas, and a tomato rice dish, all garden fresh! Another exciting project youth are engaged in is a collaborative produce giveaway with the American Indian Family Center and Dream of Wild Health. We’ll purchase produce from DWH to put together boxes for the AIFC and Urban Roots community, and include cooking demos that highlight fun ways to use the produce!
Finally, Urban Roots and East Side Table continue our cooking demos on the East Side Table Facebook page every Wednesday at 4pm. You can catch Saba, our CF manager or Terese Hill sharing their favorite recipes and giving away prizes to lucky participants through early December!
Conservation Program: A lot has been happening in the Conservation Program this fall! We are excited to announce that we have hired May Vang, who has been our Conservation Program Seasonal Supervisor for over 5 years, as our full-time Conservation Program Manager. May will continue to lead our youth interns in habitat restoration projects while building upon her network of teachers within SPPS through her years as an environmental educator at Belwin Outdoor Science Center, finding new ways to offer Urban Roots experiences to SPPS students adapting to the times.
We’ve also reconnected with a research team at the Metropolitan Council advancing the youth in parks project started last fall, where our interns will share their dreams of an improved, equitable, and accessible regional park system. Youth helped draft a letter to submit to the council and filmed short videos highlighting what they appreciate about their parks. For National Public Lands Week, (September 21) we partnered with Mississippi Park Connection to lead a tree planting event at the DNR Willowbrook site, as well as a seed collecting event at Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary with St. Paul Parks and Rec and Lower Phalen Creek Project. How have you been connecting to your parks lately?
Market Garden Program: Autumn is a bountiful time in the gardens. The apples are ripe, the squash is ready for harvest, the tomatoes have given us hundreds of pounds of fruit, and our storage crops come in from the fields for our winter sales. As the colors change and the weeds die back, it’s a time that we can really appreciate all that we’ve done and all the gardens have provided us over the course of the season. This summer we grew produce for a record number of CSA members and donated a record amount of food to our East Side community through direct donations to our youth and their families, CLUES, and Indigenous Roots.
We successfully hosted both an in-person and virtual youth program. The youth in the virtual program told us that “This program might have been the last time in my recent memory where I enjoyed learning, and the first time in a long time where I actually did hands-on stuff, like experimenting in my backyard. I’ve learned an immense amount of stuff, and plant knowledge that I’ll probably keep for the rest of my life,” and “My favorite thing about growing my plants is that I get to share with my family the crops I grow and I feel accomplished.” We were so excited that young people in East Saint. Paul who weren’t able to get out of their homes this summer could feel some of the joy and gratification that growing plants can bring.
We were able to hire-on four of these virtual youth to work in-person with us in the Market Garden Program as Seed Crew (1st year interns) this fall! We learned lemongrass harvesting and the significance of various Hmong crops from Yia Vang and sold him tons of peppers for his restaurant hot sauce! We hosted an event with Indigenous Roots at Rivoli Bluffs, distributing food to community members to take home. We are also engaging small corporate volunteer groups this fall to put our gardens to bed for the season. Cheers to all the youth, community members, volunteers, employees and CSA members who helped make this season, with all its challenges, a great success.
