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October 19, 2007
Just Us for Justice
Four of the youth we work with received scholarships to attend the Youth Food and Farming track (Just Us for Justice) at the 2007 Bioneers Conference. Thursday, October 18th, was the the pre-conference day and Alex, Mark, Marzett and Andy piled into Karen’s car and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge at 7:30 a.m. We met up with the group near the Conference grounds, and piled in a van with others from the Alameda Point Collaborative and traveled out to Nicasio to visit All-Star Organics. There we met with Janet Brown, one of the farmers who is also Program Officer for Food Systems at the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley. After some ice-breaker games, Janet toured us around the farm, showing the evidence of repeated and early frosts this year that have really hammered their tomato and melon crops. That prompted some good walking conversation about economic relationships that best support farms and farmers. We ended up in the greenhouse where we all helped strip dried herbs from stems for some of their value-added products. We left satisfied that we’d made a contribution to All-Star in exchange for their hospitality.
From All-Star we traveled back to San Rafael and ate lunch at the Marin Farmers Market, and then did some shopping for the dinner that we were to make and enjoy together. We met chef Bryant Terry at the market. In addition to being a great chef, Bryant is a food justice activist, and founding director of b-healthy! (Build Healthy Eating and Lifestyles to Help Youth), a New York City-based nonprofit organization. He recently co-authored the book GRUB: Healthy local, sustainable food for all.
We traveled from the market to the Marin Youth Center which has an amazing kitchen designed by Rachelle Boucher of Generation Chefs, self-described as a youth education and mentoring program supporting the next generation of chefs and culinary enthusiasts that runs some culinary programming at MYC and elsewhere. Rachelle welcomed the group of nearly 30 youth, warmly and proudly sharing the kitchen. Pie Ranch/Mission Pie youth loved working in that space alongside Rachelle, Bryant Terry and the other participants, and together prepared a fantastic meal. Everybody went home ready to get up early on Friday to come back to hang with new friends at the Bioneers conference.
On Friday, Mark, Andy, Marzett and Alex all were up and ready to go ahead of schedule and Laurie MacKenzie from Mission Pie drove them to the conference. They all listened to plenary speakers Jay Harman, Judy Baca, Judy Wicks, John Abrams, and Van Jones during the morning. In the afternoon, they hung out with the young women from the Lower Eastside Girls Club who run a farmers market program and have a bakeshop in New York, kindred spirits indeed. Afternoon workshops included listening to some of the grandmothers council, a group of indigenous women wisdom keepers from a diverse array of cultures and communities.
We’re grateful to Bioneers for including our youth in this amazing experience and look forward to hearing their impressions and reflections in the coming weeks.
-Karen
Posted by Pie Ranch at October 19, 2007 11:37 PM
