Our True Work
Youth interns in our Market Garden urban agriculture program gain experience selecting crops, starting seeds in a greenhouse, prepping garden beds, caring for plants, and harvesting. They also learn about plant families, pests, and disease, food processing, and food safety. Our advanced interns even get their own 10’x10’ plot to steward entirely on their own.
All of these skills could set them up to be future farmers or empower them to grow their own food for their family for increased food sovereignty, or they might inspire a career in agricultural policy or environmental science. The experience also develops skills in observation, planning ahead, problem-solving, efficiency, attention to detail, and communication, which are transferable to anything they do.
At Urban Roots, our real mission is to nurture youth in their interests and help them become the adult they want to be. To do this successfully, we put relationships first. We take the time to get to know our interns and ask a lot of questions about what experiences they want to gain. The youth not only feel that their opinions are important, but they also see that they are being heard as what they say guides changes in our organization.
Over the years youth interns have asked for networking, public speaking skills, more leadership opportunities, more art, more science, more environmental justice, and to make a larger impact on the community. We have developed our programming around these requests. Youth are active in the Metro Food Justice Network, and we spent a summer in Youth Council focused on how to network. Each winter we teach a public speaking class to new youth. Advanced youth now help create and lead curriculum for new youth and help lead school field trips and volunteer days. In our Seed Stories project, youth conducted interviews, created short videos, and produced a zine to celebrate and amplify the relationship between East Saint Paul residents, the land, and culturally-specific foodways. We also offer “Science Deep Dive” in partnership with the University of Minnesota where participating interns dig into research and more technical soil and environmental science. This year, our Youth Council is dedicating an entire year to environmental justice to help youth gain a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the work they do.
While we commonly see our youth go on to higher education for degrees in the environmental field (and currently have a youth enrolled in culinary school!), the skills they develop are valuable whether they want to be teachers, scientists, artists, policy-makers, business owners, or anything else. At Urban Roots, we’re a vessel to empower them to get there.
