2012 January Photo-of-the-Month

Starting off the year "Food, What?!" style...youth chefs Irma, Jacques, and Thairie cooking up delicious food in celebration of our success with the Good Times Community Fund.  They went big with winter squash, sage, goat cheese and cheddar mini quiches, and rainbow chard spanikopita, with veggies that they grew last season.  2012 is already proving to be another powerful year for youth in FoodWhat.  Looking forward to sharing with you--our FoodWhat Community-- our stories and photos over the next twelve months...stay tuned!

"Food, What?!" GOING AND GROWING IN 2012!

GREAT NEWS!
  
From the incredible generosity of
our FoodWhat Community, 
$20,057.25 was raised to support 
FoodWhat from the GoodTimes 
Community Fund! 

THANK YOU!!

Support

Right now, every dollar will be matched!
  Now's the time...You give a buck, we get 2!

FoodWhat was chosen for the 2011 Good Times Community Fund!

The Good Times Community Fund raises awareness of, and support for, local organizations that help youth through offering educational, leadership and career opportunities.  We have the goal to raise $12,500 through the Good Times Community Fund.  Right now every dollar donated will be matched.

(Note- to receive the matching grant, all donations need to go to the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County with FoodWhat noted as the recipient.)


Please Consider a Year-End Donation to Keep FoodWhat Going and Growing in 2012! 
         
Every bit counts--from $10 to $10,000--each contribution will keep us strong and supports local youth!




 Max (FoodWhat Youth) and Doron (Director)
 chat with you about this awesome opportunity!


Help us meet our goal!

THANK YOU!,
Doron, Abby, and the FoodWhat Crew

All donations are tax-deductible.

2011 December Photo-of-the-Month

Photo of Abel, CC (center), and Geoleal

Words from CC:  "Working for FoodWhat I have accomplished beyond what I could ask for out of this program. I’ve gained a sense of what a community is. I have changed in ways that help me live healthier. I’ve grown personally. I have always taken things harshly and beaten myself up for silly things. In FoodWhat I’ve been able to focus more on the positive things in life. I’ve been able to do a really good job, work hard, complete it, and be proud of it. And that feels good--being proud of myself."

A BIG congratulations to CC for his recent acceptance into the Culinary Institute of America!

Wishing you a happy and healthy new year,
with love,

Doron, Abby, and the FoodWhat Crew

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Food What Fall Leadership Program

Each fall, participants who have successfully completed the FoodWhat Summer Job Program apply to take leadership in managing one of the FoodWhat businesses. They go through an initial training for their job and then become the youth manager or co-managers for that business. Meet this year's crew:

Farm and CSA Management

Steven and Sam come to the farm every Monday to take care of all the farm needs -weeding, planting, trellising peas, prepping the farm for the winter, etc.

On Tuesdays they harvest, wash, and pack 10 CSA shares for low-income families and a day care center. Each bag holds eight to ten of the following crops we are growing: beets, carrots, onions, leeks, squash, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, apples, beans, chard, kale, basil, radishes and more. Tawna, a UCSC intern, then loads the vegetable bags onto a bike trailer and delivers the shares to the families. Each bag is valued at $20 to $25 and is sold for $10 to help meet our goal of making healthy and fresh food accessible to all.

Flower Business Management


Mason and Jacques manage the flower business. Twice a week they harvest flowers and make bouquets to be sold to local businesses around town. You can find our flowers decorating The Filling Station, The Penny Ice Creamery, The Picnic Basket, Gabriella Cafe, Cafe Delmarette, Companion Bakeshop, and the Maple Street Clinic. We also sell bouquets at our farm stand at Gault Elementary School.
Many thanks to these businesses for supporting our program and the youth!

Each summer we plant sunflowers for a U-PICK Sunflower fundraiser at the UCSC Harvest Festival. Every year we try to time the planting perfectly (and hope for the ideal weather) so that the flowers bloom on the weekend of the festival. This year it worked and we sold over 200 sunflowers!

 

Farm Stand Management

Angel and Salvador co-manage our farm stand at Gault Elementary School. We partner with the Santa Cruz Ed Foundation, Freewheelin' Farm, UCSC Farm and Garden, and Happy Boy Farm to bring local organic produce to the parents and teaches of Gault at an affordable (subsidized) price. This year we were even able to accept EBT. Each week, Angel and Sal set up the stand, handle all of the sales, clean up, and do the accounting. Among many other skills, they are getting real job experience and training in customer service and money handling--skills that will serve them in future jobs.

Culinary Arts

Kayla and Irma are the Culinary Arts Team. They prepare meals for Life Lab's adult workshop participants, were the primary youth chefs for our Benefit Dinner: Harvesting Justice serving over 150 people, and they preserve our harvest by canning salsa, pesto, and tomato sauce for next season. They also helped to pilot our new Granola business! You can now find Food, What?! Granola at The Filling Station!

This fall Kayla also led a cooking workshop for other youth at the Walnut Avenue Woman's Center, showing them how to make tasty veggie quesadillas using whole grains and farm fresh veggies.

BLASTS! (School Garden Support)

  
Each week Edgar, Josh, Sal, and Irma go to a school garden or community center garden and bust out a big work project to support their garden. This fall we "Blasted" at Green Acres Elementary, Westlake Elementary, Bonny Doon Elementary, Gault Elementary, and Mesa Verde Community Garden. We moved compost bins, planted fruit trees, pulled out invasive grasses, painted trellises, dug beds, and cleared large areas of land for new garden beds to be built and for gardens to expand. The work we are offering these sites supports the education of youth and adults not only about food and nutrition, but also about math, science, history, observation, critical thinking and more.

Harvest Festival Planning and Management

This fall, as the youth event manager, Max planned and implemented the FoodWhat Harvest Festival. Starting from visioning the event to figuring out the details of getting the word out, arranging volunteers, organizing supplies for each station, making maps, setting up each station, talking to press, Max learned all it takes to put on a major event. As a result of Max's hard work and dedication, the event was a huge success. Click here to learn more about the event.

Max and Edgar harvesting pumpkins for the event for the pumpkin carving station. Each participant at the Harvest Fest gets to take home a pumpkin.

2011 November Photo-of-the-Month (GoodTimes Community Fund Recipient!)

Please join Max (left photo) and Edgar (right) in celebrating some great news!  FoodWhat was selected as one of four Good Times Community Fund honorees!  This year's fund was created to raise awareness of, and support for, local organizations that help youth through offering educational, leadership and career opportunities.

View the Good Times Community Fund Video about "Food,What?!"

We get this exciting news as the farm is being put to rest for the winter and cover crop sown.  Our Fall Youth Managers have all wrapped up their projects (Flower Business, Gault Farm Stand, Beach Flats CSA, Catering, School Garden BLASTS!, and Fall Harvest Festival) and have completed a full cycle of programming with FoodWhat.  (Many have already started to lobby for their friends to get positions in the Spring Internship.)  There is a collective sense of accomplishment and tons of great stories.

We have the goal to raise $12,500 through the Good Times Community Fund.  Right now, every dollar donated will be matched.  Please Consider a Year-End Donation to Keep FoodWhat Going and Growing in 2012!  Every bit counts--from $10 to $10,000--each contribution will keep us strong and supports local youth!

Click here to read the article about FoodWhat and the fund in the Good Times.

Click here to make a donation directly to help us reach our goal.  (Note--to receive the matching grant, all donations need to go to the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County with FoodWhat noted as the recipient.)

with gratitude,
Doron, Abby, and the FoodWhat Youth Crew!

(Thank you to the Good Times, the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for this awesome opportunity.)

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Harvest Fest 2011

On October 27th, 300 high school and middle school students from Santa Cruz to Watsonville came to "Food, What?!" for a morning of fall farm activities and food justice education: pumpkin carving, cider pressing, hay rides, mini apple pies, farm fresh pizzas, food justice wall, "the hydration station", a fair trade and food miles workshop, a skit about healthy decision making and more. See the video and great press below to get a feel of the day.



And some press from the day

Edible Monterey Bay  “You get to experience food you’ve grown and cooked yourself,” says Jacques Jackson, a 17-year-old high school senior who wants to study culinary arts at Cabrillo College next year. “I’ve learned how to cook, what’s in my food, what’s healthier for my body, and what will fill me up more.”
Jackson’s job this fall has been to co-manage the FoodWhat flower business. This involves harvesting flowers and arranging bouquets that are bought each week by local businesses and restaurants and sold at the FoodWhat farm stand at Gault Elementary School.

Hub Pages nice photos and a video of FoodWhat youth reciting spoken word on his FoodWhat experience.
“I used to smoke,” Salvadore said. “I used to drink. I worked here, I started thinking outside the box. People…who didn’t have a backyard to grow their own food…came up to me and asked me for vegetables and stuff. I’m the man.”

Santa Cruz Sentinel  Students also were able sample different varieties of apples, or most popular, fresh veggie pizzas wood-fired by Jamie Smith, Santa Cruz City School's director of food services. With a hot fire, Smith churned out pizzas in the farm's outdoor oven, using squash, peppers, beet, and other fresh organic vegetable. Hands grabbed for slices before he even finished cutting them.

FoodWhat Lavender Ice Cream?!

This week The Penny Ice Creamery used FoodWhat lavender to make Lavender Honey ice cream! Head down to the Penny Ice Creamery this week to try it out!

2011 October Photo-of-the-Month

Top Photo: Steven Valadez and Sam Gouveia harvesting youth-grown produce to feed our community.

Who gets this farm fresh organic nourishment?
-8 low-income families in Beach Flats
-1 day care center for neighborhood children
-and The Beach Flats Community Center for their brand new healthy snack program (inspired by our partnership)

For that past 22 weeks the FoodWhat Youth Crew has been growing, harvesting, and packing veggie shares worth $25 for an affordable (subsidized) rate of $10 each for folks in Beach Flats.  Today was the last day of the shares, and in total the crew harvested an impressive 1800 pounds!

Bottom Photo: Angel Chisholm and Sal Vasquez managing the Gault Farm Stand.

Yesterday was the final day of the farm stand that Sal and Angel have been running as their Fall Management Job.  Selling fresh, organic produce at the same cost of conventional produce at the local Esperanza Market, and accepting EBT, Sal and Angel have served many happy parents and teachers for the past 9 weeks.  Everyone who came was expressing how sad they are to see the market go and wished it could be there all year.

Angel reflected:  “I’m proud that I’ve had this job this long…that I stuck with it.  I learned how to hold down a job, do customer service, and accounting, and show up on time, and learned to schedule my (personal) appointments on days other than work.  You guys have really taught me a lot…"  Angel also spoke about how Brian King, one of his teachers, shared how proud he is of Angel for sticking with it, and finishing strong.

(Lots of thanks to our partners at Beach Flats Community Center, Gault Elementary, Santa Cruz Education Foundation, Freewheelin' Farm, Happy Boy Farm, and UCSC Farm and Garden!)

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CC's Story at Civil Eats

In a recent Civil Eats post writer Amber Turpin interviews past Food,What Junior Staff CC:

...In 2009, CC was attending an alternative education high school. Doron Comerchero, director of “Food, What?!”, came to the school one day offering internships. His local program empowers youth through the growing, cooking, and sharing of food. Though CC signed up in order to get out of school early on Fridays, his hooky plan became a serious commitment.

“Doron pulled my ass out of the gutter. It was a really bad year for me,” he recalled in hindsight. That initial 12-week internship led to a “Food, What?!” summer job program in which he was paid to participate. Earning actual money reinforced the value of the life skills he was learning and cooking and catering turned out to be something that CC actually really loved.

The full circle process of growing, harvesting, menu planning, cooking, and presenting “felt like a lot more than a catering job, in a good way,” he said....

Read the full post

Brandon's Ryhme

This poem is to capture what "Food, What?!" means to me personally. I came from a place where drugs and alcohol were the only thing filling my time. Now, I don't hate on the medicinal, but totally filling my life up with something so unproductive wasn't the business anymore. I'm lucky to have what I have. Thanks to Doron and Abby, for helping me accomplish what I want to do.

Brandon worked with FoodWhat as a first year in 2009 and a Jr. Staff in 2010

SC Youth Food Bill of Rights!

In July, four FoodWhat youth went to Philadelphia for the Rooted in Community Youth Leadership Summit (RIC). While at the conference, the 150 youth participants from all over the nation gathered together, asked all of the adult mentors to leave the space, and then created the Youth Food Bill of Rights: 19 points demanding what youth believe our food system should look like. Read more and participate at youthfoodbillofrights.com.

Kayla and Mason returned to FoodWhat after their experience at the RIC conference and brought this work back to Santa Cruz. They led us in a workshop where we created the Santa Cruz Youth Food Bill of Rights:

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY - YOUTH FOOD BILL OF RIGHTS

• This document was produced by youth from Watsonville to Santa Cruz in August of 2011. 
• These are the 10 goals that we are calling for to make our community a healthy place to grow up in. 
• WE THE YOUTH who created this are all a part of “Food, What?!” – a youth empowerment and food justice project.  We invite you to partner with us to realize these goals.

WE THE YOUTH CALL FOR:

1. The removal of genetically modified food from being produced on Santa Cruz County farms, or sold in local stores

2. The elimination of pesticides and other chemicals poisoning our land, farmers, and consumers

3. An increase of local and sustainably raised foods

4. Our local farmers and farm laborers to be paid more and treated with respect

5. Fast food to not be cheaper than healthy food—that’s unfair and more poor people eat fast food because it’s cheaper

6. Giving thanks to the earth—it’s not our world…we’re just borrowing this land and we shouldn’t abuse it

7. More education for our community about their food choices—about what they eat

8. The creation of more community gardens—more places where all people can grow their own food

9. The creation of more healthy food grocery stores in Watsonville and Live Oak to increase accessibility and availability to healthy food for all

10. More programs like FoodWhat to teach about sustainability, activism, healthy lifestyles, food awareness and nutrition—and a FoodWhat program for 3^rd-5^th graders to get this while their young

WE THE YOUTH want to know when we eat food, no one is being mistreated and the earth isn’t being harmed and we’re not harming ourselves.  We want food justice for all.

Join us at youthfoodbillofrights.com

Harvesting Justice Benefit Dinner 9/10/11

Friends, Family, Partners, People,

Harvesting Justice Dinner Event
Saturday, September 10, 5-7pm
FoodWhat?! Farm
(@Life Lab on UCSC Campus--Santa Cruz)

Please join us for a farm fresh dinner grown, cooked, and hosted by the FoodWhat?! youth crew. Come have a delicious local organic meal on our beautiful farm run entirely by local teens.

The youth crew will not only serve your taste buds, but also your sense of hope, as they share their stories of personal growth and leadership development through organic farming and cooking.

Read about FoodWhat?! in the GoodTimes article: The Kids are Alright

100% of proceeds support a real job and job training for youth, and donations are fully tax deductible.

Thanks to a supportive community our 9/10/11 event is full. If you want to be contacted before our next event leave your information here.

Want to learn more ways to support FoodWhat?! Click here to learn how.

2011 August Photo-of-the-Month

August 2011. Kayla, Jacques, and Angel offer reflections upon successful completion of their 8-week summer job with FoodWhat.

"I changed a lot since I’ve been with foodwhat this summer. It’s been a good place for me to be working then on the streets running a muck. I’ve changed my behavior a lot. Now I honestly know that the right thing to do in my life is work, stay positive, look up to a positive person, and do what’s right for me." (Angel, age 16)

"I’ve learned how to be a leader, flip a compost, trellis tomatoes, plant corn and beans together effectively, irrigate a crop, cultivate crops, how to be more professional, how to do well when applying for a job, and how to be a better person, and make better life and health choices. I am more confident and I have more knowledge and skills." (Jacques, age 17)

"I have successfully worked a regular hour workday. I wasn’t absent one day. I’ve learned how to speak to people professionally and really gained confidence in what I am capable of doing.

I have learned how to be a hard worker and how what I put into my body affects it more than I think. I have grown in ways that are hard to describe. For a while I was really unsure of everything I did or said. Now I’m more comfortable with myself." (Kayla, age 18)

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Summer 2011 Slide Show

Here are our highlights from the summer program. 
Enjoy!

GoodTimes Talks Food Justice with Food What

GoodTimes readers get schooled on Food Justice.

Thanks GoodTimes Editor Greg Archer for an incredible look at Food Justice and our program!

Stay connected to "Food, What?!"

9/10/11 "Food, What?!" Benefit Dinner. Share a meal with the youth who cook up a life changing recipe of healthy food and personal empowerment. Learn more.

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Learn more ways to support Life Lab. (life changing work could use your support)