Outreach & Education

Initially begun in September of 2020 in collaboration with the Evansville African American Museum (EAAM), the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library (EVPL) Lincoln School, Legacy Taste of the Garden (LTotG) and Memorial Community Development Program, Urban Seeds is a proud partner and sponsor of the Book n’ Cook initiative.

The EAAM and EVPL invited Urban Seeds to facilitate the Cook portion of the Book n’ Cook program, as part of their 3-month outreach to encourage shared family reading time. The project incorporated a month of fiction reading, a month of picture books, and a month of non-fiction reading, all with a focus on the Black experience and rich history of farming and homesteading, including the deep connective roots to African culture. October’s book was geared to children and we chose Bring Me Some Apples and I’ll Make You a Pie: A Story About Edna Lewis. Edna Lewis is a well known Black chef and food justice advocate, who encourages children to engage in gardening and cooking at age-appropriate levels, all the while weaving stories of her childhood with her sharecropper parents in the south. Urban Seeds donated a mixing bowl, a baking dish, and a hot mitt to each 3rd – 5th grade student participant, as well as all the ingredients. The story book had been read in a live-stream event the week prior, a copy of which was also included in the cooking kit and funded through the EAAM.Using locally grown apples from Engelbrecht’s Countryside Orchard, we made the apple crisp recipe from the book, live streaming the cooking class from the marvelous kitchen at Trinity United Methodist Church, a dear Urban Seeds partner. Denise and Paula of the Legacy Garden, whose family has been farming at Lyles Station since pre-Civil War, and which is the last remaining African American Settlement in Indiana, led the students in the cooking, all the while weaving in wonderful cultural and farming/gardening related information. The children were enchanted, and oh-so-proud when they shared photos of their apple crisp!

In honor of Black History Month EVPL, Legacy Taste of the Garden, Urban Seeds, and Trinity UMC partnered again to make another recipe from this marvelous book — a corn pudding. Once again, the book was funded, this time by EVPL, and Urban Seeds supplied the cooking kit and ingredients. Denise and Paula again facilitated the cooking portion, sharing rich tales of their childhood running and playing in the cornfields.

The first two B n’C events were greatly enjoyed by the students and their families, so much so that we solicited additional funding to create a 5-month seasonal series to highlight locally grown foods. We offered this series from June – October, adding measuring cups and spoons and a larger mixing bowl to the cooking kits, and three new books for each student, listed below. We featured local produce as we made seasonal dishes, using these recipes: Strawberry-Rhubarb cobbler in honor of Juneteenth, Baked Stir Fry, Tomato-Peach-Canteloupe salad, Pancit, and Butternut Squash soup. The teaching of the recipes and cooking techniques was shared between Urban Seeds and Legacy Taste of the Garden, while the EVPL staff provided expert camera and audio recording behind the scenes. The recorded cooking sessions can be seen here. We even added a Holiday Book n’ Cook class in November so the children could learn to make a side dish and a dessert for the coming holidays! Combining literacy with autonomy in the kitchen all the while connecting children to how food is grown–especially the importance of locally grown food–and prepared is a wonderful opportunity, and one for which we are proud to have been a partner.  Special thank you to our private donor, a retired teacher who dearly believes in the power of reading. xo

The books donated by EVPL and the EAAM were purchased through an Indiana Humanities Collaboration grant :

Cora Cooks Pancit, by Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore

The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs, by America’s Test Kitchen

In the Garden with Dr. Carver, by Susan Grigsby

Bring Me Some Apples and I’ll Make You a Pie, by Robbin Gourley

Grow! Raise! Catch! How We Get Our Food, by Shelley Rotner

Going Down Home with Dad, by Kelly Starling Lyons

Urban Seeds is the lead organization for Nourish, Community Food Buying Club (nourishevv.org). Thanks to a generous grant from Welborn Baptist Foundation, we are able to collaborate with several community partners to initiate this project with the goal of diminishing nutrient-insecurity in the Evansville area. Nourish has two key strategies:

• To provide nutrient dense staple foods via an online shopping platform at prices that will be, on average, 40% lower than big-box shopping, and
• To facilitate an educational series that will empower families to cook nourishing and culturally familiar meals at home.
• More recently, we have been granted additional funds to ease the transition in the year of Covid from Relief to Recovery, with the longer-term goal of our community’s settling into Restoration/Resilience. Our 2021-22 themed grocery boxes will be underwritten at 50% to further make nourishing food available to the children and families in our community.

There is a delicate balance between the importance of filling empty bellies and that of embracing our moral obligation to fill those empty bellies with foods that nourish–as opposed to deplete–our health and well-being. Families living with nutrient-insecurity are often relegated to the lowest nutritional value foods due to the low cost of those foods. Unfortunately, those foods happen to be highly processed with additives and chemicals, some of which are linked to diminished learning capacity and behavior challenges in children, as well as being associated with chronic disease states later in life, such as obesity and diabetes.

The goal of the Nourish is to increase access to more of the high nutritional value foods, more whole in their nature and lower in processing, to truly nourish the children in our community so that they may grow into our next generation’s leaders. As important is our embrace of building trusting relationships with our members so that they will be responsive to resilience-building and restorative behavior change leading to regular family meals, cooked fresh.

Nourish will increase access to nourishing food for our members by providing nutrient-dense foods at wholesale prices. In June of 2021 we will open a new online platform to offer themed grocery boxes, with 50% underwriting made available via a generous grant from the Evansville Covid Relief Fund. We anticipate ~ 12 months of very low pricing to be shared with our Nourish family members.

The logistics of Nourish:

• Members will use an online procurement platform to order perishable and non-perishable themed food boxes. Ordering will be made every other Tuesdays by 3 PM. Groceries items will be available for pick up at Trinity United Methodist Church at 216 SE Third St, Evansville IN 47713 every other Thursday from 4 – 5:30 PM, following the Tuesday orders. Family members will pick up their pre-ordered, pre-paid food boxes from the front of the TUMC, facing 3rd Street.

• Payment using SNAP/EBT, Debit, or Credit Card is accepted. Members are expected to order at least one grocery box per month for a minimum of $10.00.

• Upon delivery by our distributors, the food items will be aggregated into temperature-controlled bags and/or boxes per each family’s order.

• Nutrition classes and cooking demonstrations will be provided (scheduling pending as Covid restrictions are eased) to coincide with the ordering closure and rendering of payment for orders. Class attendance will be incentivized with points being awarded; these points will be redeemable for kitchen tools, with a quarterly drawing for more points providing the opportunity to redeem for small kitchen appliances such as a blender, insta-pot, pots, and pans. (Addendum: with Covid, in-person education classes and shared food tastings had been stopped but we look forward to resuming in person classes when it feels safer to gather in public).

• Following nutrition guidelines and SNAP staple food requirements, the following foods will be ordered in bulk and stored on site on shelves for the dried goods and in a refrigerator and freezer for the perishable items.

• • Legumes & grains
  • Pasta
  • Fresh and frozen produce
  • Meat
  • Eggs
  • Various dairy produce to include cheese, milk, yogurt, sour cream, butter
  • Condiments & sauces
  • Dried herbs & spices
  • Two themed dinner boxes, one Mexican the other Italian, each containing ingredients for two meals

• Staffing
  • The Nourish program coordinator is a 20+ hour per week position. The coordinator will be on site for the entirety of the Thursday grocery distribution day and on Tuesdays to help families with their online orders, as needed.
    • Tom Z. may be reached at (812) 213-7225 or via email at nourish@urbanseeds.org
  • Volunteers will be on site during the food aggregation days with no more that 6 adults present at any given time, under the supervision of the staff
  • A ServSafe-certified Food Manager will be on site at all time during the delivery, sorting, and aggregation of food
  • The TUMC site is not open to the public

• Partners
  • Funding partners
    • Welborn Baptist Foundation
    • Trinity United Methodist Church
    • One Main Financial
    • Thomas and Sharon Ruder Foundation
  • May 2021 funding from the United Way Evansville Covid Relief Fund will allow for ~ 12 months of providing themed food boxes at an additional 50% off from wholesale pricing
  • Deaconess Health Care is providing the access to their food procurement wholesale pricing
  • Trinity United Methodist Church is providing the kitchen space with required grease trap for food aggregation and storage
  • Urban Seeds is the fiscal agent and will provide administrative oversight to all aspects of Nourish
  • Purdue Extension is providing RD’s as teaching partners for the educational classes (Addendum: with Covid, this aspect is on hold for now)
  • YMCA is providing use of their kitchen for some of the cooking demonstrations, and is providing child care for parents while they are in class (Addendum: with Covid, this aspect is on hold for now)
  • Healthy Communities Partnership is acting in an Advisory Board capacity

 

Nourish is a collaborative community project, managed by Urban Seeds

www.urbanseeds.org

Director, Robin Mallery may be reached at director@urbanseeds.org, or at (530) 263-4827

5444 E. Indiana St., #353 Evansville, IN 47715

 

We are excited to announce the inaugural Story Challenge, an event for high school students to write/speak/film/perform their perspective on the intersections of Food Justice with cultural familiarity, food access, and poverty. A $1500 scholarship and a one year position on our Board of Directors will be awarded. As we endeavor to contribute to the cultivation of the next generation of leaders in our community, the Story Challenge is a way to encourage thoughtful awareness, to foster collaborative pursuit of opportunity for positive impact, and to support engaged youth leaders.

High School Story Challenge

Urban Seeds invites all local high school students to explore the intersection of food justice with culture, poverty, disparity, and assumptions, using the medium of your choice:

Speech  |  Essay  |  Video  |  Poem  |  Song

Using your choice of the following prompts, please tell us how you see the Mission and Vision of Urban Seeds connecting to food justice.

1. How do our environments affect accessibility to and our relationship with food?
2. How do our traditions with food relate to our health?
3. How does food build community?
4. How does food break down barriers and overcome stereotypes?
5. What changes could be made to ensure everyone has equal opportunity to access nutritious foods?

Criteria for participation: student in good standing

Time considerations for submissions: 1000 words for essay; maximum 5 minutes for speech, song, poem or video

Submissions accepted via email to urbanseeds.org@gmail.com until January 15th 2021. 

Finalists will be invited to apply for a student Board of Directors position as well as receive a $1500.00 scholarship for the post-high school training or education path of their choice. 

• Please include in your submission email a few sentences about yourself including your name, age, school you attend, and post high school education/career goals. 
• Give two strategies you would use to promote food justice and food security awareness among your high school peers if selected as the Student Member of the Urban Seeds Board of Directors. Be creative! (Example of ideas: recruit and lead peers to volunteer at food assistance /event/programs; develop a value-added feature to an existing food assistance event/program; develop solutions for issues facing a specific community program that serve low income families)

Scholarship recipient will be announced February 5th 2021.