Giselle
Pablo
Working with the youth in the garden helps to create well-rounded citizens with strong life skills and community perspective. From school teachers who plant pea patches with their students to visionaries who facilitate youth entrepreneurship programs and inspire the leaders of tomorrow, a huge portion of The Harborside Community Urban Gardens is facilitated through youth involvement.
These are just some of the students that are passionate about the community urban gardens.
Meet the Youth
Grant
Yanel
Harborside Community Urban Gardens
Growing a Healthier Tomorrow
The school garden that Harborside Academy started turned into one of the most influential experiences of my life, motivating me to stay involved with the garden even after my years in high school and paving a path of interest for me on my road to college.. I've seen how kids grow up to be unhealthy adults because they ate in their youth as unhealthy children, but not by choice. This was what hit home for me with our garden and I knew we were going to make a change. Looking back at all of the progress Harborside's garden has made has made me even more proud and even more inspired to have been and still be apart of! It has led me to the University of Wisconsin-Platteville as a Soil and Crop Science major with an emphasis in Plant Breeding. I want to take what I have experienced with the school gardens and put it on a global scale. Our work is hard and honest, and it is also the kind of work that doesn't go away as generations change. We are reaching a new horizon in community interaction and their focus on healthy eating. I would never change our focus or our success for anything in the world!
"Working on this garden has instilled a sense of pride in helping others. Seeing the way the garden has grown in just the past three summers is amazing. When the Harborside Community Garden was established, myself and three of my friends spent every Saturday from 8:30 am-2:15 pm selling produce to the community at the HarborMarket. From my involvement in this garden, I’ve joined the University of Rochester MicroFarm. The MicroFarm is exactly like the HCG, except we’re focusing on increasing the amount of local foods our dining halls purchase to become a more sustainable university. Also, I’m currently pursuing a B.S. in Environmental Science with a geological focus, along with following the Pre-Medicine path. My ultimate goal is to become a Pediatric Surgeon, with a possible focus in Pediatric Neurosurgery."
The Food for thought: Fighting Child Obesity project did not solely consisted of working in the gardens and teaching healthy eating habits to kids. It had a more sentimental meaning to me because I was raising child obesity awareness – a national issue, within my community. More importantly, I was passing on this knowledge that I had acquired to the Hispanic community in Kenosha: I translated brochures about the gardens, and I was able to educate parents and children that don’t understand English about the importance of growing and eating healthy foods. After, this project I understood the value of being bilingual and it motivated me to improve my Spanish, therefore, I am now double majoring in Spanish and Psychology. In order to gain more experience, I am currently volunteering at the Albany Community Center in Chicago, helping Spanish- speakers improve their English
Harry Brighouse, in his commentary of educational reform, On Education; argues for an educational system that promotes students flourishing with their personal lives. It came as a wonderful surprise that one of the examples of this progressive reformation, already beginning to take root; was the establishment of school gardens. If there’s one object of my experience of highschool that I’m most proud of, it would be my co-authoring of the State Farm Youth Advisory Board (YAB) grant, and my subsequent involvement as the student representative for the Harborside Communal Urban Garden (HCUG). It opened up an incredible opportunity to meet people whose passion for communal gardening far-exceed my own, and more important; it allowed for me to contribute in my slight way to the expansion of this passion to children, whom may never have been introduced to it otherwise. Viewed with hind-sight; my largest regret of the project, was not immersing myself more absolutely into its fulfillment.