Community Education, the Forgotten Department

Mabel (left) started a one-year term this past June as an AmeriCorps VISTA worker for Farm to School and Community Education. Today, she is helping out at the Armory Park Farmers Market at the children’s station, which provides kids with a space to color and learn about different types of produce. 

We do food demos, activities for kids. We can go to senior centers, libraries, and after school programs teaching about the food system, about why it’s good to go local. In my personal opinion, it's so important to reach them at the earliest stage possible and just get them interacting with the seeds even. They don't know that those are necessarily attached to a fruit and vegetable that they know. Like, [Abigail] picked up the corn kernel and she wasn't familiar with it, but that's so important to be like, ‘look, this is a corn kernel. You can plant it in the ground and grow the food that you eat.’ 

Then, also, it helps the parents if they want to have some child care at the market. Sometimes that's a barrier to accessing the market. Kids, it's hard to take them here. We just try to entertain them as well. 

The food sample is mostly just to let them know what's in season. We can find all this stuff at the market. It's just giving them a recipe that they may not know about. Especially, we usually bring American recipes. And those reach people who don't necessarily know about American food. 

I'm doing a food demo at the Broad Street Market on Saturday. It's with the Women's Refugee Care organization. They're going to be showcasing their traditional African cuisine. They're going to be making an African spinach, beef, and peanut stew. And then the vegetarian option. That's our way to notify the more white population what they can do with ingredients that they aren't familiar with at the Farmer's Market. But we don't necessarily have the demographics to do culturally appropriate cooking demos like that. So it's important to partner with other organizations that do. That also gives them an opportunity to earn some money and spread their culture, which is great. 

We try to go to as many markets as possible. There’s one every day of the week. So we kind of rotate. We try to come to Armory as much as possible because it's definitely the biggest and it has the most kids, but we have kind of a small department right now, so it’s hard to get to every market. You can really tell that it makes a difference when we are there, and they always ask when we're going to come back and stuff, and it's hard to say. We can't be here every week. 

I wish that Farm Fresh gave the Community Education (CE) department more funds to hire consistent people. We work most of our employees out of AmeriCorps, so AmeriCorps actually pays our salaries rather than Farm Fresh. But it's only a year-long thing, so every year we get basically a brand-new department, which is hard to develop because after one year, they leave with all the information that they had. They're starting over from square one, which is a challenge. So hopefully in the future we'll get some more recognition about our impact and some more funds to actually have consistent people here. Because it would be great to go to every market every week, and they used to do that. I think we just shifted our priorities to more in-school things rather than at markets, since we know we will have participants. Sometimes at the markets it's hard to justify having a CE table. 

I will only be here until next year, and then [my role will] be passed onto the next soul. We depend on AmeriCorps, but we also depend a lot on volunteers and seasonal workers. But same fallback. The CE department is the one that mainly uses AmeriCorps. 

I think that’s the issue, that there aren’t many permanent positions, depending on the department. We're mostly grant-funded, and grants run on a cycle. So we'll only have a set year of for-sure funding, but then after that year's up, we don't know if our grant will get approved again. It's hard to take on permanent full-time people, because what if the grant funding that's paying for their salary suddenly doesn't get approved the next year? Then you have to let them go. That's difficult. And CE is definitely the most grant-funded. And the other departments can self-sustain because there's more of an apparent need for them. They'll always have people that will be full-time. 

People don't see as much of an impact from us. The impact is later in life. They'll remember. I went to the farmer's market when I was a kid. I met all these farmers and I learned about local food. That'll influence their later-in-life decisions. So it's not immediate return on the effectiveness, but it's still really effective. Which is—it's difficult to say that to the community, but also the bosses at Farm Fresh. I feel like sometimes we're the forgotten department.