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."