Transcription:
Lee Van Roth: You're listening to 89.1 WEMU. I'm Lee Van Roth, and this is On the Ground Ypsi. It has been a busy year for Ypsi food, equity and sustainability nonprofit Growing Hope. From expanding youth gardening programs and improving access to its community farm to renovating its commercial kitchen for aspiring food entrepreneurs, the org has introduced several new initiatives while continuing its work around food access and advocacy. Today, Growing Hope Executive Director Julius Buzzard is here to talk about some of these new developments, the people and partnerships making them possible and what the organization is looking toward next. Julius, thank you so much for being here today!
Julius Buzzard: Absolutely! Thank you for having me!
Lee Van Roth: So, looking back over this past year, what are some of the developments coming out of Growing Hope that you are the most excited about and how do they kind of fit into this broader mission that the organization works from?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to really decide which things I'm most excited about because we're doing so much good work here with our team and through the community. But some of the bigger projects that I know a lot of folks in our community and team have put a lot work into this year have been, obviously, the renovation of one of our spaces downtown at the Ypsilanti Farmers' Marketplace. We took what had been for a while a vacant building. It had some other uses throughout time, but it's now our accelerator kitchen, so a space where small food businesses can move sort of a step in between from being, and we already have an incubator kitchen that's fully shared use. This new kitchen, it's right on the road, so there's retail-facing elements of it, and it gives a small business an opportunity to really put into practice everything that they've learned and put together as they're on their path towards getting into their own brick-and-mortar.
Lee Van Roth: And I know there's been some updates and improvements to the farm as well on Michigan Avenue. Can you tell us a little bit more about those?
Julius Buzzard: Yes, absolutely! We have been doing a number of sort of infrastructural projects in both of our spaces this year at the farm. It's been throughout the space, but a lot of our focus has been on thinking about how we bring community in, how we welcome people into our space and how we really make it accessible. And that's everything from pathways to how wide our rows are to what type of signage that we have. I think, most notably, if someone were to visit our farm this year and just notice what is new, they've noticed right away the sharing garden, so that's the area of the farm that's right at the front of our space where the parking lot's at. And that's a place where people can come and harvest at their leisure. And that's the space this year where, so far, we've taken apart and rebuilt the beds that were there to make them more accessible, but also sustainable. It's something that we hope will last a long time. We've added a cement path and have some more improvements that are yet to come. And that space in particular, again, thinking about how can we make accessing fresh food, fresh fruits and vegetables as accessible as possible to as many people as we can. And we've actually been recognized alongside a number of other community gardens and organizations throughout the country through the Cultivating Connected Communities Prize Challenge. And so now, we're getting to work alongside some folks across the country and get some feedback from them really focused on that accessibility piece.
Lee Van Roth: And as part of this community connectivity kind of piece of things, there's also been a lot of work as far as the partnerships with YCS and Lincoln Consolidated Schools as well. What are students in this area kind of getting out of these partnerships and these programs that the farm is offering?
Julius Buzzard: I always say that our work with youth is where it all started for Growing Hope, and it continues to be a very core piece of our mission, of our theory of change, and of the way we want to engage the wider community. So, this year, we're always finding ways to deepen those partnerships. We've been partnering with the work alongside YCS for a very, very long time. And in the past couple of years, this year in particular, we're really deepening that partnership with Lincoln Consolidated Schools as well, so whether that's field trips that we have to both of our spaces, actually the farm and the incubator kitchen, or it's our presence in classrooms. I know, this year, we started a new partnership with Perry Early Learning Center, where our youth team is going and leading a garden and cooking club for their first graders every month or so but also working alongside teachers and educators and really building the farm-to-school network and the farm-to-school pipeline. I'd say that's part of our longer-term vision for how we continue to impact and work alongside our educators, not only on the education piece, so getting kids with their hands in the ground, working with the culinary program, working with the new botany program, supporting composting, but also thinking about procurement and how we can support and get more local, more fresh food in our children's lunches and breakfasts.
Lee Van Roth: This is On the Ground Ypsi on 89.1 WEMU. I'm talking with Growing Hope Executive Director Julius Buzzard about the org's work this year to make local food systems more accessible, sustainable, and community-driven. Julius, you mentioned a bit about the sort of recognition that Growing Hope has received this year at the national level, and that is a really interesting aspect of the work that you guys are doing to me because I know that there is work being done supporting the state Legislature in order to increase this access to healthy food options. How does the state and beyond advocacy kind of fit alongside the work being done directly on the ground here in the Ypsi community?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah, I'm glad that you asked that. The advocacy piece of the work that we do is also core to our work. It's not necessarily a thing that we have defined or specific programming around, but we've been involved as an organization and as a community in advocacy around food and food access since our inception. So the way that that's looked this past year primarily has been through advocacy around the right to food, which is a right that's been recognized by many countries around the world, as well as a couple of states, a handful of states, throughout our country. And we've been doing a lot of narrative work, just being in the community, talking about the right to food, hearing what that means for folks from different backgrounds across the state, but in our community, really thinking about how one of the food issues that relate to food workers, to farmers, to farm hands, to people who eat food, people who are buying, everybody interacts with food. So, how does the policy around right to food impact them? And as we've been doing that this year, we've had the opportunity to talk with a number of our legislators, both at a county level, as well as a state level. And this summer, we worked with Representative Dievendorf from the Lansing area and were able to have a resolution passed that they put forward that was recognizing Right to Food Day in Michigan. And I think it's 13 other representatives co-signed onto it, and it was unanimous. It got unanimous support. And so we really see this as a step towards making the more concrete policy changes that we hope to see in our community, as well as in our state, again, to take care of the people who are interacting with food, to really elevate and embolden our local food system, which, for the state of Michigan, is really core to so much of who we are, to our landscapes, to our economy, to our day-to-day. And we're excited to have been able to make that step this year.
Lee Van Roth: You know, with all of these different projects and programs underway, what is coming down the pipeline from Growing Hope as we look toward 2027? Is there anything you can clue us in on?
Julius Buzzard: Yeah, we are looking towards 2027. I'd say all of the things that we've talked about today are things that we're continuing to work on. You know, I mentioned the sort of challenge prize that we won. We're just at the beginning of that, so they recognized some of the work that we have been doing and are continuing to support us along that way. And we're looking for partners and supporters who can come alongside us as we think about what accessibility looks like within not only our physical spaces but within our greater food system. We're looking for more ways to continue engaging and deepening the work that we're doing with youth through leadership opportunities. Again, I think that's a place as we're looking for ways to partner with folks in the community to provide more in-depth, just educational opportunities and leadership spaces for our young folks.
Lee Van Roth: Well, Julius, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing more about Growing Hope's work throughout this year!
Julius Buzzard: Absolutely! Thank so much for inviting me here, Lee!
Lee Van Roth: For more on today's conversation and a link to the full article, visit our website at wemu.org. On the Ground Ypsi is brought to you in partnership with Concentrate Media. I'm Lee Van Roth, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU, Ypsilanti.
Resources:
Jenny Rose Ryan's Feature Article: What’s new at Growing Hope
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