ReThink! Growing in the Spring
Featuring: the Mighty Mushrooms, the Big Tomatoes, and the Green Giants
by Montague Williams (KCUYC Project Based Learning Coordinatorr)

Why are there no grocery stores in the urban communities where the KCUYC students reside? Would our communities eat healthier food if fresh vegetables were more accessible? Can we grow our own vegetables and offer them to the community? These are the type of questions the students at the Kansas City Urban Youth Center are asking these days.

For this semester’s ReThink! Project, the students are creating an urban garden in the backyard of the youth center. The plan is to use the home-grown vegetables for our Friday Night Dinners and for our very first community Farmer’s Market this summer. During a dialogue concerning the ways the KCUYC students have been reaching out to fellow youth of the community, one student leader shared that “if this garden project goes right, we’ll be reaching out to adults too.”

Some students were silently uneasy about the idea of a garden project, until one day at the beginning of the semester a middle school student loudly blurted out in frustration, “Why are we doing a garden anyway?” She opened the door to ownership and creativity as her question turned into an hour long discussion with all students fully engaged. They were able to share their own observations of the limited supply of healthy food due to the lack of grocery stores and strong presence of convenient and liquor stores. Now a few months later, as I write this article, there are 20 of our students doing research on how to successfully grow the vegetables of their choice.

The students are divided into three teams for the sake of research and gardening—The Mighty Mushrooms, The Big Tomatoes, and The Green Giants. Each team will make five presentations throughout this semester, and the winning presentation for each category wins Subway sandwiches for their team.

The categories are:

1) Current Issues

2) Nutrition

3) Practical Gardening

4) Spirituality

5) Conclusions

These are helping the students think holistically and creatively about how they purchase, eat, and offer food. We continue to anticipate and encounter hopeful answers to the questions students are raising about “growth” in their community.