Gardening Workshop Opportunity

Do you live near Philadelphia and have an interest in improving your gardening skills? Check out this exciting kitchen gardening workshop…

This Spring and Fall, a long time friend of The Growing Connection and a world-renowned expert on growing heirloom vegetables, William Woys Weaver, is holding a series of gardening workshops at his Devon, Pennsylvania kitchen plot.

Dr. Weaver is the Director of the Keystone Center for the Study of Regional Foods and Food Tourism and a Contributing Editor at Mother Earth News. His book Heirloom Vegetable Gardening is considered a classic on this subject.

We thought you might be interested in this unique opportunity. Dr. Weaver nurtures and propagates over 3000 heirloom variety vegetables in his garden every year, and has a wealth of knowledge to impart.

The three part class series (mix and match class dates available May through October) will cover “Everything You Will Need to Know to Launch Your Own Kitchen Garden”. For more information on this opportunity, click here.

The Obesity-Hunger Paradox in US Cities.

A recent article in the New York Times examines the seemingly contradictory relationship between obesity and hunger in many poor urban neighborhoods in the U.S.

It seems counterintuitive that communities struggling with obesity could also be suffering from hunger, but this is frequently the case in poor urban neighborhoods. A recent Food Research and Action Center survey found that South Bronx, New York, a county with consistently high obesity rates, also has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the country.

Hunger and obesity doesn't only occur in the same neighborhood, but often afflicts the same household, and even the same person. Increasingly, the hungriest people in America today are not skinny, but overweight. This is why hunger and obesity are not parallel issues, but “flipsides of the same malnutrition coin” says Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

One of the primary causes of this obesity-hunger paradox in cities is low-income households' limited access to affordable, fresh nutritious food. Many urban neighborhoods are underserved by supermarkets that stock affordable nutritious food. However, there are usually a multitude of food-vendors that sell cheap, high-calorie foods with low nutritional value.

As a result, this hunger-obesity problem cannot be solved by simply increasing access to food, but by increasing access to the right kinds of food.

The Growing Connection aims to be a part of this solution by giving urban communities the opportunity to grow and consume fresh nutritious food. We work with young people, women’s groups, schools and urban farmers in several large U.S. cities to develop highly efficient and innovative urban vegetable gardens. TGC can have a particularly positive impact for children in urban neighborhoods. We have consistently seen that kids become more enthusiastic about eating healthy vegetables when they are involved in the growing process.

Supporting The Growing Connection One Search at a Time

Imagine that you could support your favorite cause simply by searching the internet. GoodSearch (powered by Yahoo!) offers one of the easiest ways to support The Growing Connection by letting you do just that.

Every time you use GoodSearch to search the internet, fifty percent of the ad revenue generated by your search results will be donated to the charity, school or nonprofit organization of your choice. All you have to do to support TGC’s work is to choose TGC (under the name "United States Committee for FAO") as your favorite cause on the GoodSearch website and start searching. To make it even easier to support TGC initiatives through your internet searches you can download the GoodSearch toolbar here. The GoodSearch toolbar provides easy access to GoodSearch on your web browser.

GoodSearch also recently expanded to include GoodShop, an online shopping mall of established merchants dedicated to helping fund worthy causes across the country. Every time you purchase something through the GoodShop mall, a donation - averaging approximately 3% of the sale, but going up to 20% or even more – will be made to TGC.

Easy no? So what are you waiting for? Get searching and shopping and feel good doing it!

Moving towards Healthier School Lunches

The Child Nutrition Act (CNA) is due to be reauthorized this year by the United States Congress. The CNA includes the National School Lunch Program, which provides school lunches to some 31 million US children. Slow Food USA, a non-profit with the goal of creating a world in which everyone can enjoy food that is good, clean and fair, has organized a petition to urge members of Congress to invest more in school lunches and improve the nutritional value of school lunches. You can support Slow Food’s petition here.

First Lady Michelle Obama’s recently unveiled ‘Let’s Move’ initiative to counter childhood obesity in America also supports greater investment in school lunches to improve the health and well-being of school children. You can hear the First Lady talk about the program in the video below. You can also find out more about the Let’s Move initiative by following this link.

Recovery Efforts in Haiti

Haiti is struggling to recover from the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck near Port-Au-Prince on January 13. Recent estimates suggest the earthquake claimed more than 100,000 lives and left nearly a million Haitians homeless.

Since 2008 TGC has worked with Project Medishare, a non-profit organization that provides health care for more than 75,000 Haitians. Project Medishare doctors are currently providing vital medical relief on the ground in Haiti. You can follow Project Medishare's work in Haiti here.

Prior to the earthquake, TGC and Project Medishare worked together to develop EarthBox vegetable gardens in Haiti’s central plateau, one of the country’s poorest regions. The TGC-Project Medishare partnership is ideal because sustainable agriculture and access to healthy food are key to improving community health care.

A trial garden using 20 EarthBoxes was initially set up to explore which locally-grown vegetables would flourish in the EarthBox, and to develop local mediums and planting methods. Following the success of these trials, EarthBox vegetable gardens have been set up in five elementary schools in the villages of Thomonde and Marmont and a local clinic in Marmont. A group of poor, at-risk adolescents called IDEJEN (Young Idea) has also been involved in the project, receiving hands-on training in growing produce using the EarthBox. This work will become vital once immediate relief efforts come to an end and attention shifts to Haiti's long-term reconstruction.

If you would like to help us achieve this goal, please visit TheGrowingConnection.org or ProjectMedishare.org.

The Growing Connection in South Africa

In partnership with Operation Lionheart and the Open Society Institute, TGC is currently developing several EarthBox vegetable gardens in South Africa. So far, in addition to a large demonstration and research garden, there are four EarthBox vegetable gardens with over 500 EarthBoxes in the country. Thanks to the ongoing support from Operation Lionheart each site receives horticultural training and they are already starting to make real progress.

For example, the Mother of Peace orphanage in Johannesburg (above) has a garden with 1000 EarthBoxes and in only six weeks after planting they have been able to harvest vegetables such as spinach and zucchini twice. The progress these gardens in South Africa have made in a very short amount of time is very exciting and you can continue to follow their progress through this blog!

The World Summit on Food Security

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is hosting the World Summit on Food Security November 16-18 in Rome, Italy.

Heads of state and government ministers from around the world have come together to discuss how the scourge of global chronic hunger can be eliminated. Even though we have the capacity and knowledge to produce more than enough food for everyone in the world, roughly one billion people - that’s one of every six people on the planet - suffer from chronic hunger. Amongst those that suffer the most from food insecurity are children. For example, one baby dies every six seconds due to hunger and nearly six million children die every year as a result of hunger.

FAO has created a special website for the event which provides background, agendas, reports and live streaming of the event. You can access it here.

In conjunction with the World Food Summit FAO launched a “1 Billion Hungry” petition. Watch FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf’s call for all to join and sign the petition through this website.

This is an ideal time to focus on issues of hunger in your classroom. In addition to the resources coming out of the World Food Summit, FAO has abundant relevant information provided in the FAO hunger portal. You’ll find important facts, figures and accessible graphs on the issue of global hunger and malnutrition. A particularly interesting tool is the interactive hunger map that shows the prevalence of hunger in different parts of the world and offers country-specific data on hunger.

In addition to these resources, FAO recently released the 2009 State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) report. The SOFI report raises awareness about global hunger issues, discusses underlying causes of hunger and malnutrition and monitors progress towards hunger reduction targets established at the 1996 World Food Summit and the Millennium Summit.The 2009 report examines the impact of the economic crisis on world hunger. As a result of the global economic crisis, developing countries are facing declines in remittances, export earnings, foreign direct investment and foreign aid, leading to a loss of employment, income and access to food. In combination with the persistent effects of the global food crisis, the global economic crisis has led to a sharp increase in the number of hungry and malnourished people around the world.

You can download a free copy of the SOFI report here. Please contact amy.mcmillen@fao.org if you’d like to receive the report in hard copy.

We hope that you’ll be able to take advantage of these free resources to help your students and communities understand the complexity of hunger issues, but also to emphasize the importance of their work and participation in the solutions promoted by The Growing Connection.