New Jersey’s City Green inspired by Nourish
Amy Jolin, Program Director of City Green, shares how her organization uses Nourish in their environmental clubs and urban farm-based education programs.
City Green is a nonprofit organization based in northern New Jersey. We work in under-served communities as advocates for food justice, for the expansion of community gardens, and for school gardens in every school. We also write curriculum support for teachers in northern New Jersey to help them connect the core curriculum to the hands-on learning laboratory that is the school garden.
The Nourish materials have been a huge inspiration for us and the students we support. Part of our work includes the support for ten Environmental Clubs serving over 200 middle school youths. We discovered the Nourish materials and purchased a DVD for each Environmental Club to use in club meeting and to keep as a reference. Then we downloaded the free Nourish Curriculum Guide and printed it with sturdy binding for each club to take with them as a club gift after a dynamic Environmental Conference.
Our summer program is an urban farm internship for 18 inner-city high school students who work at a youth-led farm stand and receive training in finance, environmental issues, nutrition, and job readiness. During the summer, we used the Nourish videos and curriculum to introduce the food revolution to our interns.
We’ve gotten very positive feedback from our interns and from club leaders that the video and learning activities have given their students a new understanding of how food is part of the community experience for all of us. This exposure helps them to identify food access issues in their own communities as well as to recognize the nutritional deficits that impact their families.
Thank you, Nourish, for collecting this wonderful snapshot of the story of food and for making it so accessible to students and educators all over America. Your work has made a tremendous difference.
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