Just Garden Project: Growing Food in High Point and Redmond

Author: Kali Orkin

Have you heard of the Just Garden Project (JGP), an Americorp program run by Seattle Tilth? JGP builds subsidized raised bed gardens in the yards of low income families and seniors.  The goal of JGP is to alleviate hunger and provide social equity to families by teaching them how to grow their own healthy food and promote healthy, happy communities.

Spring is rapidly approaching, and JGP is looking for volunteers to participate in building raised bed gardens.

Selfish Volunteering: A Post-New-Year Resolution

Author: Candice Goldsmith

Happy March!  How many of you made a New Year’s Resolution?  According to USA.gov, here are common ones:

• Drink Less Alcohol
• Eat Healthy Food
• Get a Better Education / Job
• Get Fit / Lose Weight
• Manage Debt / Stress
• Quit Smoking
• Save Money
• Take a Trip
• Volunteer to Help Other

Now’s the time for a self-check; and let’s be honest.  How many of you are still living up to your resolution?  It’s OK if you aren’t. Based on a quick internet search, anywhere from 50% to 88% of resolutions are abandoned by February 1.  There are lots of reasons why they don’t always work out, likely because most of these resolutions require self-sacrifice that often doesn’t outweigh the perceived benefits.

I’d like to propose a mulligan – a chance for a fresh start by feeling great while doing something for your own benefit: Selfish Volunteering.

DataCamp Seattle!

Reposted from the Code for America blog:

City governments have a lot of information which is useful to all of us. This ranges from maps of local parks to building footprints to real-time 911 calls. We all have an interest in our budget information, legistlative documents and other resources that we use in collective decision-making and deliberation. Not all of this information is currently available for all cities, even though much of it is public record. The “Open Data” movement is a way to work on getting information into machine-readable formats, allowing for easy publishing, sharing, and reuse.
We’re hosting DataCamps in CfA’s cities this year to build communities around making city data more open and accessible to allow citizens to help cities work better.
DataCamp is a event focusing on skill-building and collaborative work on city data. It is an opportunity for interested parties in a city to work together, and build a network of people with shared interested in improving civic communications and information management.

The Seattle event will be this coming Saturday, and here are some more details:

WhereSocrata Office101 Yesler Way, Suite 502Seattle, WA 98104
WhenFebruary 19, 2011 10 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. (Registration at 9:30 a.m.)(President’s Day Weekend)
ScheduleRegistration: 9:30 a.m.Introduction: 10:00 a.m.Hands-on Workshops:  10:15 - 11:45 a.m.Workshop presentations: 11:45 - 12:00 p.m.
Lunch 12:00 - 1:30 p.m.  (Socialize with people you don’t know!)
Project Introductions: 1:30 - 1:45 p.m.Project time: 1:45 - 5:15 p.m.Project presentations & Closing Circle: 5:15 - 5:30 p.m.
Afterwards: Drinks/dinner with anyone interested in attending.
CostFree - but you must register at http://datacampseattle.eventbrite.com/
What to bringBring laptops & power strips if you have them.If you are working on a project with city data, bring your project ideas. Be aware that you will probably have 2-3 real working hours with anyone who is interested in helping you. So frame your project so that folks can pitch in and get something done by the end of the day. If you have questions/ideas please get in touch. We would love to discuss.
If you use a technology-based tool that you feel would be useful for others to learn, bring a demo. Examples: data scraping, embedding datasets, 'open data for journalists', using map data, etc.
There is room for 50 people.
Questions?If you have any questions about this event, please contact the Code for America team via email: seattle (at) codeforamerica (dot) org
About this DataCampOrganized by the Code for America fellows, who are in Seattle for the month of February.
Code for America, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is a new public service, sort of like a Peace Corps for Geeks. The fellows are partnering with the City of Seattle to create solutions that allow for collaborative problem solving between the city and local civic leaders and community organizers. Learn more: codeforamerica.org/seattle, Twitter: @cfaSEA, email: seattle@codeforamerica.org
Socrata is a Seattle-based company that provides cities with a way to make data open and accessible for all. In addition to their work with data.seattle.gov, Socrata was recently spotted during Obama’s State of the Union address: Socrata helped the White House to publicize their log of visitors. Learn more: socrata.com
Seattle is a pioneer in the use of digital technologies in support of open data and online civic engagment. Seattle is participating in the first ever year of Code for America.

Tour de Fat recap

As promised, we spent the day of the Tour de Fat staffing the "Compost Offices" for New Belgium. It was a fun day, and a chance to learn a lot about how waste reduction works on the ground, and a bit about the company (check out their sustainability page - it's impressively comprehensive).

Lessons learned:

• An event like this can be run with minimal environmental impact: for example we managed a 95% waste diversion rate. I lost track of the exact amounts, but most of that was compost, with a small proportion of recycling, and only the remnant 5% going to landfill.
• Doing this takes a lot more work on the day than just dumping everything, and a lot of planning; one thing I was impressed with, for example, was that the food vendors had been pre-vetted for their ability to provide all compostable packaging.
• Staffing the waste stations makes a huge difference—we found a lot of inappropriately sorted garbage on the morning, from having left the bins out in the park overnight, but everyone is co-operative when pointed to the right bin.
• It didn't matter that the beer cups said COMPOST in big black letters on one side, or that there were signs up listing what went into which bin - people are creatures of habit enough that most automatically took those towards the recycling bin.
• But there are visual cues we can give people which help; a sort of Design With Intent for waste sorting. Here are two examples:
  • If you look at the picture below, the tiny office trashcan is for landfill waste, while the other two were recycling and compost - that made everyone who wanted to landfill stop and think. It was an accident originally—I hadn't realised we'd be handling landfill waste too, until it was too late to get official-looking bins for it so I improvised and raided our office—but it worked so well that I'll definitely repeat this next year and get intermediate-sized bins for recycling.
  • After this picture was taken, one of our volunteers (Tysan) hit on the idea of closing the lid on the recycling bins, to make people pause before dropping compostable cups in.
• And finally, one that I was taught repeatedly as a computer science student: document everything. Sustainable Seattle has done this job at the Tour de Fat before, but the people who did it in previous years have moved on and I had to rediscover a lot of things. I'm writing it all down, so even if it's not me next year they can do a better job of co-ordinating and spend half as much time on it.

A huge thank you goes out to:

• Everyone who volunteered on the day, especially the couple of people who stayed for much longer than you had signed up for.
• New Belgium Brewing for taking the sustainability of the event so seriously, and Brian Bogan there for being patient when I had to ask all these things he expected me to already know from last year.
• Cedar Grove Composting for collecting the material and turning it into lovely compost that will be used in Seattle parks, among other places.

We're making the Tour de Fat a zero-waste event, with your help

This Saturday, New Belgium Brewing is bringing their Tour de Fat to Seattle. It's a bike carnival in Gas Works Park, with a parade around Fremont, costumes, "insane bicycle contraptions", music, and of course beer. As well as being a fun event, we love it because it promotes cycling, the day will raise money for two wonderful local nonprofits—the Bicycle Alliance of Washington and Bikeworks—and the organisers are partnering with Sustainable Seattle to make it a zero waste event. Making it zero waste involves not giving out any material that can't be reused, recycled or composted, and having volunteers at every set of bins to make sure people do recycle and compost everything they should. We need your help with that last part.

We'll have 5 compost stations, and we'd like to get two volunteers staffing each one from 11am to 5pm, ideally for two hour shifts. We'll give you a cheat sheet listing everything that goes into each bin, so you'll just have to talk to people and show them what to dispose of where. It's a great opportunity to help reduce the environmental impact of a public event and educate people about waste reduction, and you'll still have plenty of time to enjoy the event yourself.

If you are interested, please email Eldan Goldenberg with a preferred time (preferably a 2-hour block, but we're flexible), and a second choice in case everyone picks the same time. If you represent another non-profit, please let us know, and we'll be happy to give you some space to hand out flyers at the event.

UPDATE: there will be t-shirts and free beer tokens for volunteers!

Alleycat Acres Fund Raiser

TUNES BY DJ COLBY B and BETT LAW! DRINKS! NEW FRIENDS! RAFFLES! AND TONS OF FUN! ALL FUNDS RAISED WILL SUPPORT ALLEYCAT ACRES, AN URBAN FARMING COLLECTIVE WHOSE MISSION IS TO CREATE URBAN FARMS ON UNDERUTILIZED SPACES.
$5 - $20 suggested donation @ door

Volunteers needed this Saturday!

FARM BUILDING! COMMUNITY CALL OUT! SATURDAY MAY 22nd!!

THIS SATURDAY 10AM - 2PM at Yesler Community Farms - Park on Main or Walk In (Look for Signs on Main St. Dead End off 12th.)

The GroundUp Program and Yesler P-Patch Gardens NEED YOUR HELP! We have 20 Yards of compost coming and need help moving it for neighborhood gardeners and seniors! We also have to build some more compost bins for residents and move some chip bark, build beds, and lay some seeds!!

Please bring boots, gloves, shovels, and we have music and water!

Help make Yesler Terrace a working urban community farm!

MAP: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?client=firefox-a&hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=106996620109898029488.00047ac8d19bce2d1c2b9&t=h&z=20

Urban Agriculture, lessons and hard work

On Saturday March 20th I showed up with a friend in tow to the Yeslar Terrace community center to help out with the p-patch restoration and expansion project. The day was shining, the neighborhood was still sleeping and the bus got us there right on time.

I saw a few colleagues of mine already there, Owen our videographer, and Corey the Community Development Co Lead. I greeted them and then ducked out of the way of the camera trying to hide my face and likeness. I don't want another screen cap of my grill being the face of our next video like the staff video up on our website...scary.

There were about thirty people in attendance with most of them youth from various community groups like Ground Up Yeslar, Seattle Tilth, a few local High Schools like Franklin and of course the agriculture professionals, one of them a fifteen year veteran at this particular growing site.

The students were dressed sensibly and were excited about the prospect with roughly half of them female and the other half...male. I spoke with Karen from Ground Up as we had previously met at the Journalism that Matters conference and it was great catching up. She then convened the volunteers and we had a brief, but effective safety meeting.

The students were fired up and the atmosphere was friendly, dedicated, with banter that was surprisingly appropriate. I'm always surprised how much people expect teens to be rude, obnoxious, cursing troublemakers, when the majority of them that I've interacted with over my many years has been exactly the opposite.

I decided to go do some composting and after an hour of wheel barrow shifting, shoveling, sorting, digging and listening to an adult give the teens a true history of African American heritage, I was tired and feeling great.

The p-patch itself is very large and spread out amongst the apartments in Yeslar Terrace. The patches are mostly overrun with native plant weed, but they are fertile and with the right stewardship would be a reliable source of food for the community.

Corey was chosen to be a lead in one of the projects and he cheerfully responded. He is doing so much work in this community and his heart is definitely feeling the unique, diverse vibe that Yeslar Terrace exudes. I look forward to coming back and seeing where this partnership leads.

Did I fail to mention the home cooked lunch provided to us after we were done? It was an exploration of East African cuisine provided by neighbors and participants. I loved the greens and actually ate more than my fair share. I kept sneaking more fork fulls onto my plate after distracting other hungry volunteers with questions and conversation. Best lesson learned is to always give participants a way to participate. The neighbors who cooked the food did what they do best and everyone benefited.