FARM STAND in action! All natural celery, zuchinni, squash, herbs, kale and glorious cherry tomatoes! Photo Credit: Ariel Roland
Visit the Grow Dat Farm Stand for the next two Saturdays!
9am-12pm
Saturday June 15 & Saturday June 22
150 Zachary Taylor Drive
On Sunday, June 30, Dishcrawl will visit 8 different restaurants in the Garden District, all within walking distance. Your $10 entry fee will give you one food/drink ticket (to be redeemed at any participating restaurant for their featured item), 4 raffle tickets, and a $5 donation to Grow Dat!
Restaurants include:
Honeydeux- Mango Bubble Tea
Diva Dawg- Red Bean Chili Dawg
Roux Public House- Chargrilled Oysters
Down the Hatch-Pulled Pork Potato Skins ; Specialty Cocktail: NOLA Palmer (NOLA twist on an Arnold Palmer tea with vodka, lemon and min)
Voodoo BBQ- Corn Pudding/Abita Beer
Use the following promo code when purchasing a ticket and $5 will be donated to Grow Dat!
Promo code: GROWDAT
Purchase youth-grown sustainable produce on our farm in June
Farm Stand
The Grow Dat Youth Farm
150 Zachary Taylor Drive
9am-12noon
Saturdays, June 1, June 8, June 15, June 22
Youth Crew Members Storie and Cory harvest greens to be sold at Saturday markets across New Orleans
Our Harvest Volunteer Days (for individuals) this spring/summer are:
Come help us harvest and prepare our produce for distribution. Volunteers will prep both our donated Shared Harvest and the crops youth Crew Members will sell at Saturday Farmer’s Markets around the city.
For Groups:
For group volunteers we suggest a $7 donation per Volunteer to cover supplies and staff time for the volunteer event. Please contact Jabari Brown to discuss bringing your group to Grow Dat.
We have various needs and opportunities for many other volunteer tasks – please email Jabari Brown, Volunteer Coordinator and Youth Education Specialist at jabari1@growdatyouthfarm.org for more information.
Come work in our beautiful fields – we appreciate your support of our work to grow food for New Orleans!
GROW DAT YOUTH FARM TO HOST HOOTENANNY- BARN DANCE BENEFIT
Grab your dancing shoes to cut a rug for a great cause
Thursday, April 18, 7pm-10pm
Grow Dat Youth Farm, 150 Zachary Taylor Drive, City Park
The mission of the Grow Dat Youth Farm is to nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food. You can support these young adults who are growing food for New Orleanians by joining us for the Grow Dat Hootenanny. Proceeds from this Barn Dance Benefit will help us employ 25 young adults to grow 9,000 pounds of food this year!
What: Hootenanny featuring Bruce ‘Sunpie’ Barnes & the Louisiana Sunspots and the Small Batch String Band. Square dancing led by caller Nathan Harrison will kick off an evening of revelry on the farm.
An ole’ fashioned Cake Walk will showcase tempting cakes from premier NOLA Pastry Chefs: Cochon from the Link Restaurant Group, Maurepas Foods, Domenica, and Boucherie.
When: Thursday, April 18, 7-10 pm
Details: $15-$20 entry to dance the night away. Fat Falafel and La Cocinita food trucks, craft cocktails and ice cold beer on-hand. All tickets, food and drink sales benefit local teens growing food for New Orleans!
Sponsored by Slow Food NOLA
Purchase tickets now or at the door: http://barndancebenefit.brownpapertickets.com
PUT ON YOUR DANCING SHOES AND COME OUT TO THE FARM APRIL 18 TO SUPPORT GROW DAT!
Look for Market Leader Amber Young (right, 2nd year Grow Dat worker) at the market every week as she leads rotating crews of new youth employees at the Pop Up Market.
To market to market we go!
Grow Dat is proud to announce New Orleans’ first weekly Pop Up Market! Youth Crew Members will be selling their wares every Saturday this spring at the new Columbia Parc at the Bayou District development (formerly St. Bernard). The market features a wide variety Grow Dat’s fresh, affordable produce grown and sold by local teens.
Grow Dat Pop Up Market
Every Saturday
10:30am-1pm
Columbia Parc at the Bayou District
@ Caton & Duplessis
DEAL ALERT! First time customers get BOGO – Buy One, Get One – on all their produce purchases!
Mobile Farmer’s Market designed by Tulane City Center Architecture student Justin Siragusa
Look for our fancy schmancy mobile farmer’s market that hitches to the back of our farm truck. See it and know that delicious and affordable produce abounds!
Granola bars, local satsumas, fruit leather, organic juices. These snacks are more than tasty: they are absolutely key to the nutrition and success of the young people who work on our farm.
At Grow Dat, our mission is to nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food–a straightforward mission and goal, but one that is complicated by the challenges facing the young adults we hire to work on our farm.
This year we have refined our evaluation tools, allowing us to capture more baseline nutrition and diet data from youth in the program. When we administered the survey this February, even we were surprised by what we found out. Of 25 youth surveyed, 50% reported not having eaten a single meal the day the survey was administered, with an additional 46% reporting eating only one full meal that day (the survey was administered at 5 pm). Only 50% reported having eaten any fruit in the last 24 hours and only 12% (3 out of 25) reported having eaten any vegetables in the last 24 hours. Additionally, 20% reported drinking at least one soda a day.
When the young adults who work with us arrive from work, so often they arrive hungry. Thus, we want to send a huge thank you to Whole Foods at Arabella Station for providing daily snacks that allow us to greet youth at the start of each work day with something healthy to eat. Often the first time they try many different kinds of fruits and vegetables is at work. This exposure to food that is good for them, that they can eat as much of as they wish, provides an essential foundation and support that allows them to thrive in the often very physically demanding work of farming. It also reinforces that they are in an environment where they are cared for, which encourages them to take risks and grow as individuals.
Thank you for your partnership, Whole Foods!
Snack time at Grow Dat! Kevin Perry and local strawberries.
Help make Grow Dat the MOST LOVED project! Click now to vote for us!
From the competition’s host, The Fetzer Institute: “Love and Forgiveness often aren’t stated goals for public service organizations which tend to focus on the more concrete and measurable aspects of their work. But the more clearly we are able to establish and examine the connection between inspiration and action — between love and labor — the more effectively we can support, expand and leverage some of most powerful resources in public service — the transformative powers of love and forgiveness.
That’s why the Fetzer Institute is offering two $25,000 awards — one for a US-based nonprofit organization, and one for an NGO outside the United States. The Fetzer Institute wants to recognize, celebrate, and honor the good work done by a vast array of public service organizations while deepening its understanding of the connection between the Fetzer mission and the broader NGO/nonprofit world.
Entries will be featured in the Global Gallery of Love and Forgiveness — a showcase of inspiring videos from around the world.”
Public voting for the MOST LOVED project will determine the winner of a $5,000 award given by the Fetzer Institute. Thanks for the lovin’!
Our giant chalkboard announces the agricultural tasks on our plate. Photo by William Widmer
Our Harvest Volunteer Days (for individuals) this spring are:
February 5th through May 17th 2013.
Come help us harvest and prepare our produce for distribution. Volunteers will prep both our donated Shared Harvest and the crops youth Crew Members will sell at Saturday Farmer’s Markets around the city.
For Groups:
For group volunteers we suggest a $7 donation per Volunteer to cover supplies and staff time for the volunteer event. Please contact Jabari Brown to discuss bringing your group to Grow Dat.
We have various needs and opportunities for many other volunteer tasks – please email Jabari Brown, Volunteer Coordinator and Youth Education Specialist at jabari1@growdatyouthfarm.org for more information.
Jabari Brown, Volunteer Coordinator at Grow Dat.
Happy 2013 from our team. Photo by Dylan Hollingsworth
Jeanne, Jabari, Johanna, Leo and Karnesha wish you all the best for much growth in 2013!
As we reflect on the accomplishments and struggles of 2012, we are grateful for an overwhelming sense of success. Our farm continues to thrive, as do the youth we serve. We’re grown so much as we now approach our THIRD year! Every year we take thoughtful, planned steps to hire more youth, grow more sustainable produce, and share more food with New Orleanians in need.
Thank you to everyone for your continued generosity in our year end giving campaign (it’s not too late!) - we are thrilled to be wildly surpassing our fundraising goals.
“A proper community is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members – among them the need to need one another.” -Wendell Berry
Happy New Year!
The Cypress Field in full bloom. Early evening, June 2012.
Will you help us grow by supporting our year-end Growing the Green giving campaign?
Real Talk: Muffin’s on the radio!
Eve Abrams, producer of 89.9 WWNO, spent last spring on our farm, following youth throughout our 5 month program. She put together a great audio piece that features one of our lovely second year Assistant Crew Leaders – Franchel Stevenson (known around here as Muffin).
Hope you enjoy listening to Muffin’s insights. Will you consider supporting other Assistant Crew Leaders through our Growing the Green campaign?
This job was the best because of the bonds that I got to make with people – and because we grew stuff. I really do grow food at home now! I never thought about it – I used to think it was stupid – when I’d see my grandmother in the garden. But now it’s amazing when you just sit there and something grows and you eat it afterwards. It’s cool because you’re really independent – you don’t need anything, really.
-Youth Crew Member
Amber and Christian show the morning harvest from the Tee Field
This holiday season we ask for your help to pay the salaries of the fabulous young people growing on our farm. Please support our work today!
We’re so excited that we’re halfway to our goal! We need your support to push us over the finish line.
Yahoo! Over 60 indivdiual donors decided to support Grow Dat this holiday season in our big push last week, and this morning we reached the halfway point of our goal: $5,500 out of $10,000! That means we have $4,500 to raise before the end of the year. Won’t you find a way to contribute to help us Grow That Green?
“My family is just really happy that I’m part of Grow Dat. I hear them talking on the phone to other family members, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, my baby be bringing home fresh vegetables and he knows how to cook and everything!’, which is so nice and encouraging.”
-Grow Dat Crew Member
Our annual Growing the Green campaign is in full swing – we need your help to make our goal. Support our health and wellness programming today!
Making collard greens and sautéed kale – youth cooking classes with local chef Ms Lanette Williams
