More beautiful garden designs

December 10th Meeting Recap

A recap of our final fall semester meeting, December 10th (a potluck!).

We will meet again Tuesday January 20th, same time and place as last semester, 9pm Hamilton 616. We will then discuss what time will be best for regular meetings next semester.

Grant Potluck Meeting Recap 12.10.08

1) Grants--Below is the grant sign-up list. Do check the requirements of the grant you are signed up for, as it is possible the project doesn't entirely qualify. If you have time to research other grants/funding opportunities, that would be really, really helpful. Sample grants are attached.

Grant (Deadline) Name(s)
Captain Planet (Dec 31) Tabitha/Becky
Healthy Sprouts (Oct 15) Saskia
Project Orange Thumb (Feb 17) Whitney
Home Depot Garden Grant (Nov 1) Julia
Columbia Sustainable Campus (Ongoing) Hannah, Andrew
Office of Multicultural Affairs Alumni Connection Fund (Ongoing) Laura, Katie
Diversity Initiative Grant from Office of Multicultural Affairs (Ongoing) Sarah, Theo
Office of the University Chaplain Co-Sponsorship Fund (Spring)
G-Unity Foundation (March 15th) Becky
Filter For Good (November 14th) Becky
Plum Grant (Ongoing) Rickie, Gracie

2) Spring fundraiser-Sarah is going to look into the possibility of hosting a spring fundraising dinner, such as a 20-person $15-20 a plate meal, using donated food. Laura also mentioned the idea of having Grant Houses residents involved in fundraising, which could be part of the dinner or another initiative. If anyone has ideas for this you're welcome to share them and investigate their feasibility.

3) Summer internships-We discussed the need for two summer interns to manage the garden, which involves managing resident and student involvement, particularly youth and seniors. The interns will need housing and a stipend, or at least enough of a stipend to cover the cost of housing. We are asking various academic departments to sponsor the interns, which involves contributing towards a fund to pay for the interns' stipend. The internships would thus be interdisciplinary positions, unless a department is willing to sponsor one intern by themselves and then can make the position more directed towards their field and include any academic component they wish. Currently people have committed to the following:
a. Becky-Office of Envi. Stewardship, the Earth Institute, Urban Studies, Teacher's College, History, African-American Studies, CC Dean'sOffice
b. Sarah-EEEB
c. Leah-Envi Engineering, SEAS Dean's Office
d. Gracie-Despommier, Dean Blank
e. Saskia-English
f. Anyone else-if you have connections with a dept. you could ask to co-sponsor the internship, please pursue it! We will likely house the interns through the Center for Urban Research and Policy.

4) Insurance-Becky is contacting the University General Counsel to resolve insurance issues for Columbia student involvement in the garden

5) After-school programming in the spring-We would like to have bi-weekly (weekly?) visits to the after-school program to discuss food, nutrition, and gardening. Sarah visited Leah last Friday to discuss the potential for this with Leanna. Gracie will be in touch with Leanna over the break to get an idea of how this could take-shape.

6) Building materials/plans-Laura will research potential resources formaterials for the garden. The Landscape Design students will be scanning and sending their plans to Becky, which she will pass on to Laura. We are still unsure of how exactly to present these plans to the community. We are considering setting up a meeting with parents, the Tenants Association, or an open meeting to the community. We also are hoping the landscape design students will continue to help to locate materials and support the physical construction of the garden, especially with things such as fence implementation and garden bed construction. Becky will be in touch with Prof. Alomar to discuss this possibility.

Landscape Design Studio

Landscape Design students from Professor Richard Alomar's Studio II class in the School of Continuing Education at Columbia spent the latter part of their summer busy at work creating potential designs for the Grant Houses Community Garden. Their designs were stunning and well though out. We appreciate all their hard work and look forward to piecing together the designs to create a unified plan for our garden, which will largely depend on the funding we receive. List below is a link to Prof. Alomar's blog, which covers the Landscape Design Studio work in November and December 2008 postings, and samples of the designs they created.

http://the-landscape.blogspot.com/

Healthy Sprouts Grant Award

We won our first grant! Yes indeed, we will soon have a $200 gift certiciate from Gardener's Supply to purchase garden tools, in addition to garden education materials, 25 packets of seeds, and literature from the National Gardening Association. We have many more grants in processing and soon to be sent. The success of our first bodes well!

See more about the Healthy Sprouts Garden Grant awards here:
http://www.kidsgardening.com/healthysprouts.asp

Communal Meal with Grant Houses Residents

We have much to catch up on covering garden activity in the fall, so I'll provide a series of post covering different parts of the project from throughout the semester.

On November 15th, CUFSP and SCEG (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification) members hosted a communal meal with residents at the Grant Houses. A recap of the meal follows, as well as pictures from the event. It was a great success, and our youth chefs were wonderful! Thank you to all the event sponsors, listed below.

Article published on the Columbia Univ. Office of Environmental Sustainability website:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FOOD SUSTAINABILITY PROJECT,GENERAL GRANT RESIDENTS SHARE HARVEST MEAL

Date: November 19, 2008

They gathered on Saturday, November 15, around tables at the General Grant Houses Community Center - Grant Houses residents and Columbia students - to celebrate many months of collaboration.
This time with a Thanksgiving feast they'd planned and prepared together.
The dinner was part of the Columbia Food Sustainability Project's much larger effort under way since last summer to develop a community garden on the grounds of the General Grant Houses. Working with the New York City Housing Authority and the Tenants Association, "we're trying to improve nutrition by gardening in the city and showing what kinds of food taste good and what can be used to cook in healthier ways," says Becky Davies, CC '10, who's been leading the project.
Davies says "we wanted to plan an event focused on the garden. The Thanksgiving dinner demonstrated how to cook with healthier, more sustainable food." The approximately 50 meal participants were invited because of their interest in the garden, the older crowd having become acquainted with it through the General Grant Senior Center and the Tenants Association, the young people through several CFSP-sponsored field trips they've taken this fall.
In the past few weeks, Davies says students had planning lunches in their dorm rooms with members of the Tenants Association. "These were really good," she says, "as the logic for the garden became tangible."
Sara Martin, president of the Tenants Association, says the dinner was a great success - "with everyone in there doing something." She describes a carrot soup "made from scratch," with Columbia student cooks and seven young helpers from the General Grant after-school program doing lots of "chop, chop, chop and slice, slice, slice" of onions and squash along with plenty of "wash, wash, wash"of collard greens.

Lots of the cooking was coordinated by Leslie Woodward, Chef at President Lee Bollinger's house, who found out about the CFSP at one of its recent on-campus garden harvest sales on College Walk. The turkeys and cornbread stuffings - one with turkey stock, one vegetarian -- cranberries and greens were Woodward's creations.
She says as the group sat around and talked, the evening "was relaxed, and felt like one big community with four and five generations involved. The cultural and economic diversity was really special."
Davies says the dinner participants were a particularly interesting group, even including a growing elderly population of Chinese immigrants interested in the possibility of a garden at Grant Houses. "They don't speak English," Martin says, "but we're still able to communicate."
Sarah Federman, BC '09, says it was a "great experience to have a meal we'd all made together." She describes sitting with "Clarence," a jazz singer, and describes her delight in being "in the neighborhood, outside the Columbia bubble. It's easy at times," she says,
"to forget Columbia is very much a part of Harlem."
Federman says "the meal is a great example of the feasibility of creating cohesive community with discourse. Also a community project such as the garden is a wonderful way to engage the community."

Funding and donations for the dinner came from numerous Columbia organizations, city agencies, local supermarkets and greenmarket venders.
For Sara Martin, who has lived in the Grant Houses for the 52 years they've been open, the collaboration and Columbia student outreach around the garden is a "first" for her. "And," she says, "I want to be as much a part of it as I can.
"We need to come together and talk about things," she says. "The world is big enough for us to live in peace, and compromise and sacrifice is what it's all about."

Added Value Trip Pictures!

Finally posting my wonderful pictures from our trip of Columbia students and Grant Houses kids and parents out to Brooklyn, for the Added Value Farm's Harvest Festival! We bobbed for apples, played with chickens, got to stick our hands in warm compost, and met many wonderful farmers. And most importantly, we rode the Ikea Ferry (shhh, don't tell Ikea!) on a beautiful, sunshine-y day!

Meeting Minutes: October 28, 2008

1) TRIP

Major problems (Columbia Transportation scheduled us for the wrong destination, location we went to closed, bus broke down on return). On the upside, we continued to get to know Grant Houses youth and some parents. Becky is battling with transportation/club administration to get our bus expenditures reimbursed.

2) COMMUNAL MEAL
Planning Lunch

Becky, Sarah, Leah, and Gracie are hosting Grant Houses women + Lesley Woodward for another planning lunch at noon, at Sarah's suite. Each person will bring a dish for the meal.

Donations
Laura will email everyone with a list of places already contacted and then assign people other places (or types of places) to contact. Andrew is pursuing Westside to ask for donations. Julia offered to call farms from the Columbia Greenmarket. Katie volunteered to also inquire about donations. Hannah is contacting Columbia catering to ask for either flatware/plates we could borrow for the event, or utensil donations, or resources for ordering utensils. Sarah will ask Alison Powell to ask Barnard Dining Services about possible use of their supplies.

Sarah volunteered to coordinate a handout of some sort for the event, including recipes and Greeenmarket information. Sarah will re-send the menu for the event as a guide to what sorts of things we'd like donated (though we'll take nearly anything!). Whitney is contact the Peer Health Exchange to find out if they would be willing to do nutrition education outreach at the Grant Houses, which we could advertise at the communal meal. We decided to wait on inviting other groups to come until we are sure about Grant Houses attendance. We also decided to invite people through the women at the planning meeting and through the day care/senior centers rather than at the Tenants Association meeting so that we have more confirmed commitments from attendees. Possibly we'll give out tickets and flyer for the event.

The task list we created for this event can be found here!

3) DESIGN
Professor Richard Alomar would like group members to attend a design workshop November 20th, 6-9pm or so. Sarah volunteered to attend. Can anyone else? Possibly Rickie or Jawad, since they had an interest in design?

4) MATERIALS
If you have NOT been assigned materials research, please email Leah to receive a piece. It's really not that hard, but we need everyone to help out!

5) BUDGET
Julia (and Tabitha?) is working on the Home Depot Grant due Saturday. Becky is providing the supplementary documents, including the letter of support from NYCHA/Grant Houses.

6) OTHER
Becky is trying to figure out how the Grant Houses project can be something other than an SGB group to solve bureaucratic problems. Andrew is checking to see how much money we have in the account (i.e. how much of the $1500 was spent on trips). We decided to postpone discussion of Grant afterschool involvement until after the communal meal.

Meeting Minutes: October 21, 2008

1) TRIPS

Added Value

Whitney and Saskia reported on a successful trip to Added Value with 11 kids and two parents from the Grant Houses. The trip included an eventful ride on the Ikea ferry, a tour of the Added Value farm, chickens, and two children proclaiming on separate occasions, "This is the best day of my life!" Quite a statement.

Pumpkin patch

Sarah and Whitney are going to pick up permission slips Thursday for the pumpkin patch trip. We have a confirmed bus for 9am to return at 2pm. At the farm (www.peacefulvalleyorchards.com) we will pick pumpkins, ride a hayride, and eat lunch. We'll make a concerted effort to talk to the kids about farms and gardens, and make a special effort to reach out to any parents that are coming. Sarah has a list of 10 participants but if we need to reduce that number because of increased youth interest we will be cutting people who did not attend last night's meeting.

2) PLANNING LUNCH

Sarah and Becky reported on a successful lunch with five Grant Houses women from the Tenants Association and Leslie Woodward, PresBo's chef. Most of the lunch (carrot soup, bread, couscous, mixed salad, apple tart) was spent listening to the women talk about issues concerning them in their community and at the Grant Houses, and in the end we discussed the upcoming communal meal. We developed a tentative menu that Leslie is going to help us see through to completion.

3) COMMUNAL MEAL

Laura and Becky are meeting with Sarah Martin, head of the Tenants Association, and Williesteen Moore, head of the Day Care Center, Wednesday to discuss space details. Becky is meeting with Leslie Woodward Thursday to discuss ideas from Saturday's lunch and to more specifically learn how Leslie will be involved in facilitating the event. Sarah Martin reserved the community center for the event, but we still don't have the kitchen reserved. Becky is going to reserve the student kitchen in Lerner as (one) backup. Sarah F is going to email the communal meal dish idea list we created at the meeting. Other specifics include: We will serve 70 people; cafeteria style not buffet style; November 15th @ 5-5:30pm (start); participants from Columbia and Tenants Association, Afterschool program, Senior Center. Whitney will talk to Community Impact about getting someone to table/distribute info about food stamps. Becky will talk to Teacher's College Nutrition dept about their potential involvement as well. We will wait on menu details from Leslie before pursuing donations. Saskia volunteered lots of bread.

4) MATERIALS

Leah provided a sign-up list for materials research, as discussed at the prior meeting. Everyone at last night's meeting signed up for a category to research (either free, reduced-cost, or purchasing sources). If you were not there please sign up for the open options when they are sent out.

5) BUDGET

Tabitha and Julia are working on the budget for the Home Depot grant for Nov 1. Other (ongoing) grants should be completed by DECEMBER 1st.

Meeting Minutes: October 14, 2008

1) TRIPS

Red Hook

We still need FIVE more students to chaperone this trip Saturday, from 9am to 2pm. Please email Sarah if you or someone you know would be willing to attend. Sarah and Whitney will discuss and communicate the details of the trip, including what to bring, where to meet, and the public transportation plan. Becky will obtain MetroCards for the trip by Friday.

Pumpkin Patch

I finally received the cost estimate from Columbia transportation for the pumpkin patch, and they downgraded the bus size. Hence I’m exploring the option of going to the Queens County Farm Museum instead, which is much closer and has a pumpkin patch. Time and date would be the same. The other options are to take a 36 passenger bus ($1200) or cut the trip short by an hour. Becky will arrange transportation, Sarah will collect permission slips, Becky will pick up the cash advance which Andrew has so nicely arranged. Becky needs WAIVERS from everyone attending, either given to her at the next meeting or else given to Walter in the SGB office (5^th floor Lerner).

2) COMMUNAL MEAL

Laura is working with Whitney and Julia to create a list of potential donors, and discussing how to recruit students (coordinating with other groups possibly) and Grant Houses residents for the event, and discussing funding needs (Andrew will be able to help with co-sponsorship applications). They are also working on getting permission to use the senior center space, and hopefully also the kitchen. If not Becky will speak to Leslie Woodward about kitchen facilities.

3) PLANNING LUNCH

Becky, Sarah and Theo are continuing to contact the Grant Houses women who volunteered to help plan the garden. They will coordinate meal planning for the Saturday event and meet the residents at noon at the Grant Houses. Leslie Woodward will be in attendance.

4) RESOURCES

We collectively decided that we will try to come up with a list of potential resources for garden construction needs this semester so that when we actually implement parts of the Landscape Design plan next semester we will know who to ask/where to look. Leah is going to divide the budget items into workable parts by next Tuesday’s meeting so we can assign a piece to research to individuals.

5) BUDGET

Becky, Tabitha, and Andrew created a budget, which is attached to this email. It is approx. $8,000 and can be used for grant applications. Saskia submitted the Healthy Sprouts Grant today! Those of you who haven’t signed up for a grant application will contact Becky and let her know what you would like to sign up for. The next grant application is the Home Depot grant due November 1^st. Tabitha and Julia will submit that grant. All other grants that are ongoing and not due in the spring semester should be submitted by December 1^st.

Meeting Minutes: October 8, 2008

1) TRIPS
Added Value, October 18th
-We will take 20 students with at least 10 chaperones.
-Sarah and Whitney delivered permission slips.
-Whitney will be the leader of the trip.
-We will travel by public transit but chaperones must pay for their own MetroCards.
-Sarah will email chaperones.

Apple Orchard, October 25th
-This will most likely be a PUMPKIN patch trip because apple season will be closing by then.
-Sarah and Whitney distributed permission slips.
-We will take approx. 40 kids/parents and 10 chaperones.
-Sarah has chaperone list.
-Andrew will get spending money for the trip.
-Becky will arrange transportation and get waivers for students. c.

Senior Trip
-Saskia is investigating the potential for this trip to occur next week.
-Undecided whether this will occur.

2) BRUNCH
-Sarah, Theo, and Becky (maybe Hannah) will facilitate the brunch with Grant Houses residents on Saturday the 18th (concurrent with Added Value trip).
-Sarah will send Theo and Becky names to call to schedule the trip, along with time/location details.
-Theo, Becky, and Sarah will then plan to cook for the meeting and discuss the garden and communal meal with the 8 women.
-Leslie Woodward, PresBo’s chef, will likely be in attendance.

3) COMMUNAL MEAL, Nov 15th
-Laura is working with Julia and Whitney.
-If you did not receive a duty this week, please contact Laura (lvb2106@cu) to help with the communal meal:
-Contact restaurants and farms to ask for donations
-Ask other groups for co-sponsorship (SCEG, BSO, Andrew will ask the Blue Key Society)
-Investigate using the Grant senior center for the event, and use of the kitchen.
-Consider logistics such as utensils, signing up students, signing up residents, budget, etc.

4) DESIGN
-Professor Alomar’s Landscape Design class will produce designs of the potential garden for their final term project this semester! More to come later.

5) BUDGET
-Andrew and Tabitha are working with Becky to develop a garden budget.
-Below are grant application assignments. PLEASE REVIEW THE GRANTS EARLY.
-We would like all to be completed by DECEMBER 1ST. If you are not signed up for a grant, let me know and you will either work with Whitney or Laura, or you will work on another funding initiative (donations, co-sponsorships, academic departments, other grants, etc.)

Welcome!

Welcome to the Grant Houses Community Garden Project blog! The Columbia University Food Sustainability Project (CUFSP) is engaging in this exciting project with our neighbors at the Grant Houses with a few goals in mind:

• To increase the availability of healthy, sustainable food for all members of the community
• To strengthen the relationship between Columbia students and Grant Houses residents through cooperation in planning, constructing, and cultivating a community garden!

To further support these goals--and encourage garden interest and participation--we are organizing community events, such as our upcoming Thanksgiving meal, and field trips to explore urban agriculture in other parts of New York.