You can’t argue with the benefits of urban farming. Not only does it provide fresh, local food, but it also helps to unite a community.
While most of these farms focus exclusively on the sprouting fruits and vegetables, a few are looking to grow better lives for a group that is commonly forgotten: former prisoners and at-risk youths.
With 2.2 million people currently in jail, according to the Sentencing Project, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But even after being released, life for many of these individuals doesn’t get much (if any) better. Many employers don’t want to hire ex-convicts, so the former prisoners fall back into their old life, committing crimes and returning to jail — continuing the cycle.
Which is where these urban farms come in. They employ those that are formerly incarcerated and at-risk youth, offering job-training programs and putting these individuals on a path towards higher education and full-time employment.
Here are three standout urban farms (according to Sustainable Cities Collective) working towards this goal.
1. Recovery Park: Detroit, Michigan
Started in 2010, Recovery Park currently has a fully-operational 30-acre farm on land that used to be an empty parking lot. That isn’t all though, as the group is now working to create a three-tiered business model that will produce fresh food for the neighborhood as well as create jobs for those unable to find employment, such as former inmates and addicts. Eventually, the farm plans to have 2,475 acres of land, plus a food processing facility and an indoor aquaponic farm. Over the next 10 years, the goal is to create 18,000 jobs.
2. Seattle Youth Garden Works: Seattle, Washington
On the west coast, you will find the Seattle Youth Garden Works. Since 1995, this group has been providing employment and education for young adults who are either homeless or involved with the juvenile justice system. Positive reinforcement and an education in agriculture, cooking, nutrition, entrepreneurship and resume building are provided to the group of 16-21 year olds.
3. Windy City Harvest Corps: Chicago, Illinois
From 2009-2013, the Windy City Harvest Corps offered 13-week transitional jobs in the urban farming industry to 60-90 recently-released inmates. During that time, the individuals were taught job skills and given the opportunity to better their lives. After completing the program, many went on to work for Windy City Harvest or to other full-time jobs.
However, with the start of 2014, the group has switched their focus to at-risk youths. Through a partnership with the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, the group will work to create employment and education opportunities to curb the rate of imprisonment among 17-21 year olds.
To check out a few more promising urban farming programs, click here.
Opportunity can arise from anywhere, and as those that participate in these initiatives are experiencing, it can come in the form of farming. Sometimes a little dirt is all it takes to live a clean life.
MORE: This Inmate Has Become a Diving Expert in Prison. Here’s Why That’s Good for America
Tag: Seattle
Cities or Suburbs: Which Area is Seeing a Population Boom?
Close your eyes and picture idyllic tree-lined streets in a cheery suburban neighborhood. If you open your eyes, however, you might still see that image — only there might be a lot of “for sale” signs posted in front yards or dark houses due to vacancy.
That’s because cities are now seeing a population influx. According to census analysis by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, this could be the decade of big-city growth.
Analyzing data from 2010-2013, Frey was able to figure out that cities themselves — not just their metropolitan areas — grew at a measurably faster rate than suburbs, with “primary cities” (those with a population over 1 million) growing 1.13 percent from 2011 to 2012. At the same time, suburban areas grew at only .95 percent.
While the difference (and growth rate itself) may seem minimal, it reflects more significant changes that are happening in a select number of cities such as New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; San Jose, California; Austin, Texas; Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina; Denver; and Seattle. All those cities have even faster growth rates even faster than the national average!
Although there are a variety of reasons that people may be migrating back to cities, one that we’ve mentioned before is the rise of the innovation district – urban areas that are easily accessible and combine a variety of organizations and people advancing ideas and promoting ingenuity. These areas attract not only jobs, but because of their cosmopolitan and integrated feel, residents too.
Another specific driver of growth could be the new transportation initiative in Minneapolis-St. Paul, another booming city, according to City Lab.
So, does this mean the demise of white picket fences and two-car garages? Hardly. As the study points out, the suburbs are continuing to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But with growth, comes innovation — giving cities the upper hand.
Landing at This Airport: Millions of Bees
The decrease in bee population is something that many people are fighting to fix, and rightfully so: they are vital to the survival of the very plants that provide our food. From the EPA’s recent grant to an app that catalogs bees around the world, there are countless solutions buzzing about.
At Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, they’re trying a new approach (pun intended): Pairing the bee’s infrastructure — colonies — with our own.
Each day, Sea-Tac facilitates up to 855 take-offs and landings and now, the jets will be in the company of European honeybees, thanks to beekeeper Bob Redmond.
Redmond is the founder and executive director of Common Acre, a local nonprofit that “produces public programs at the intersection of earth and art,” according to its website.
The project, dubbed Flight Path, fits squarely into that mission and plays an important role in helping the bee population, as it aims to transform the open space at the south end of Sea-Tac into an ideal ecosystem for them, as well as educate travelers about the importance of bees. Twenty-five hives were constructed at Sea-Tac, housing up to 1.25 million bees — which is 50,000 bees per hive! With all that bustling activity, the airport is the perfect place to house the bees.
Doing so, however, means creating a habitat that will not only be suitable for pollination, but also breeding bees that are more adaptable. The second part of this plan is what makes Flight Path so unique — instead of just giving bees a home by setting up an apiary, Redmond is giving the whole population a boost and a better chance for survival. By actually breeding the bees to best survive life in the Pacific Northwest, he is effecting permanent change for the species.
Redmond sees a lot of similarities between the buzzing little yellow insects and airplanes, which he pointed out to Grist:
“All of these things humans have figured out — but fairly late in the game, evolutionarily speaking — the bees have been solving for eons,” Redmond said in reference to the bee’s “wiggle dance” navigation system, as well as its complex transportation and storage structure, all of which are unbelievably advanced for something so small.
Redmond’s dedication to these fascinating creatures began with a few hives in his yard, and has since expanded not only to Common Acre but also his business, the Urban Bee Company, which produces local and sustainable honey bee goods and services.
“The thing that we can learn from the bees is the collective spirit of cooperation — and consumption,” Redmond said to Grist. “That’s something that is not as easy to swallow, but vital to understand for our own future.”
A future that we can only hope has more arrivals than departures when it comes to the all-important bees.
These Coaches Make Recess Work for Kids
Recess can be chaos.
As a result, disciplinary problems can lead schools to reduce playground outings significantly — if not eradicate them altogether. Just look at Seattle, where a new report from KUOW found that schools serving the poorest students might offer 15 minutes of outdoor play a day. And that’s if the kids are lucky.
The adults say it’s just too much trouble to let the children play on their own. But that’s backwards, experts say.
Nationally, almost 18 percent of kids ages six to 11 years old are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Factor in adolescents, and the number of overweight or obese kids rises above one third. Physical activity during recess can help combat this. And adding to the importance of recess are studies that have found it can improve academic performance.
“Those students are the ones we also know have higher rates of obesity, and for whom academic achievement in school is even more important,” pediatrician Paula Lozano told the Seattle station, speaking about kids from low-income areas.
Across the county in the Bronx, New York, the group Asphalt Green may have a solution — turn recess into structured exercise time. Don’t call it physical education, like the dreaded gym class. This is supposed to be all fun and games, just with a very serious mission.
The nonprofit works with some 27,000 kids and can squeeze fitness fun into any hallway or corridor, a big plus for city schools often strained for space, organizers told the station. “Any space you give us, we can be active in,” says Arlen Zamula, the program’s Associate Director of the Recess Enhancement Program.
Asphalt Green’s programs may not look like the free-for-all tag games of yore, but organizers say they’re helping kids have fun while practicing fitness — and hopefully learning a truly life-long physical lesson in the process.
A Historic Minimum Pay Hike on the Horizon for One American City
Want to reduce poverty? Increase the minimum wage. It’s that simple, say a handful of reports, and Seattle is on the verge of a city-wide raise.
On May 1, the mayor of the Pacific Northwest bastion announced an ambitious move to up the base wage there to $15 an hour — the highest of any major city worldwide, reports Quartz.
While workers cheer, a common business-owners’ lament is that increasing their costs will cut hiring and spur layoffs. But early data on a handful of areas that have boosted their pay scales suggests that businesses aren’t going under because of wage requirement bumps.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that nudging the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would put $31 billion in the pockets of American workers, 19 percent of that going to families currently living below the poverty line.
At the same time, however, the CBO estimates that some 500,000 would lose their jobs. But San Francisco saw none of the bust and all of the boom when it raised wage minimums to $10.74.
“Our data show that an increase up to $13 an hour has no measurable effect on employment,” Michael Reich, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor, told the Seattle Times. The same for Santa Fe: The minimum wage — upped from $5.15 to $8.50 in 2004 — “seemed to have helped workers and not hurt business too much,” researcher Nicholas Potter told the newspaper.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray‘s plan rolls out the increases over the next decade, and it still has to pass the city council. So while the local burger slingers can’t celebrate yet, they might be able to soon.
Meet a Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement on Its Head
Past behavior doesn’t always predict future behavior. Norm Stamper is a case in point. Stamper was the Seattle Police Chief in 1999, when hundreds of people protested the World Trade Organization meeting. Under Stamper’s direction the police opted to disperse the protesters with tear gas. The tactics resulted in Stamper’s resignation and prompted him to begin a period of “very painful learning,” he told Sarah Stuteville of Seattle Globalist. He told her that using chemical agents to disperse the protesters was “the worst decision” of his career. Ever since, Stamper has been studying law enforcement in other countries to find techniques and ideas that could be effective for the American justice system.
In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper advocates some controversial law-enforcement ideas, including legalizing drugs, abolishing the death penalty, and relying more on citizens for enforcement than police. He told Stuteville that the drug war has incarcerated far too many people, especially minority men. “We’ve got the drug war raging since 1971 and pitting police against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, creating natural animosity and tension between police and the community—in particular young people, poor people and people of color,” he says, pointing to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, resulting in a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths.
Stamper says we can learn from communities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where women gather to bang pots and pans outside the homes of men who abuse women, creating a ruckus to publicly shame the men and raise awareness of the problem. “I think we should return to the earliest days of primitive law enforcement,” he told Stuteville, believing that America can “have citizens that are attuned to, and actually carrying out, a public safety role.”
MORE: This Judge Figured Out How to Keep People Out of Prison By Treating Them Like His Own Children
When It Comes to Fostering Civic Engagement, Nothing Beats a Newspaper
As the Internet becomes more omnipresent in people’s lives, newspapers have been declining — losing ad revenue and readership, and in the case of several major publications, disappearing altogether. But besides forcing citizens of these communities to get their news fix digitally rather than the old-fashioned way, what effect does the loss of the broadsheet have? A study suggests that it causes citizens to become less engaged.
In the study “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” published in the journal Political Communication, Lee Shaker of Portland State University analyzed the civic engagement data in the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey to see what happened in Seattle when its Post-Intelligencer became an online-only publication in 2009, and in Denver when its Rocky Mountain News eased publication completely in 2009. Shaker studied civic engagement as measured through such activities as participating in local groups like PTAs and neighborhood watch committees, contacting elected officials, and buying or boycotting certain products because of the values their companies espouse. He found significant declines in several of these areas in Denver and Seattle compared to 16 other cities that maintained their newspapers during the same period.
Shaker concludes, “The advent of new communication opportunities suggests that new forms of engagement will also develop. Thus far, there are many questions about the importance of place online: why should any one place matter when we may all be virtual and interconnected? And yet, our society is still geographically organized and governed. Ultimately, if we desire healthy and productive democratic communities, then the provisioning of local news — which helps tie citizens to each other and their communities — must continue.”
The New York Times, Gawker, and Salon aren’t going to report on the city council meetings in your town, which may be one reason why some digital titans have begun propping up the old-fashioned news source. So while the newspaper may be a shopworn institution, it provides a service to democracy that no other entity can so far replace.
MORE: What Are All Those Teens Doing On Their Phones? Learning About Politics, Apparently.
Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
MORE: Poetry Program Offers Hope to Detroit Schoolchildren
This Is How You Teach Compassion to Eighth Graders
This week eighth graders at Seattle alternative school The Option Program at Seward (TOPS) put regular lessons aside to embark on a three-day mission to learn about the social services in their city and the people who use them. Students in the annual Planting the Seeds program are equipped with maps and passes for public transportation that they use to visit food pantries, shelters, and other charities, where they pitch in. Eighth graders—along with adult chaperones—sleep at churches to increase the immersion. This year they focused on getting to know homeless people.
Language-arts teacher Lori Eickelberg started the initiative a few years ago, and told Safiya Merchant of the Seattle Times, “I think this project plants a seed. I don’t know if it’ll change anybody’s life forever, but…I hope that it plants a seed of finding the beauty in the other.”
The students left their phones and iPods at home, and completed such projects as stocking the University District Food Bank and making Valentines for the needy. TOPS’ website collects some of the reflections students have upon completing the program. One wrote, “This trip has taught me so many things. It has taught me to open my heart to people I wouldn’t normally talk to. It has also taught me to be thoughtful about what I can do to help, because I can do so many things to help.”
MORE: He’s Only 16, But His Generosity is Already Worthy of a Movie
Don’t Put Away That Drill! Share It Instead
America’s sharing economy continues to grow, with more people renting their houses and cars. Now tool libraries are proliferating too, offering people a chance to borrow tools that they might only need for a quick project, and to learn from others about how to use them. According to Cat Johnson of Shareable, there are 60 tool libraries around the world, including the West Seattle Tool Library and Makeshift Society in San Francisco.
Some of these tool libraries offer shared workspace for handy types and classes about do-it-yourself projects. Makeshift Society recently crowd-funded a Brooklyn location that will have a lending library of tools creative workers use, such as cameras.
Gene Homicki, who co-founded the West Seattle Tool Library, found that software used for book-lending libraries didn’t work for tool libraries, so he wrote a new program called myTurn whose motto is “Rental, Sharing and Lending Made Easy.” “We have an economy that’s uneven and sputtering at times, and we have this locked-up value that’s just sitting, whether in an attic, garage, or gathering dust in a warehouse,” Homicki told Johnson. He said the tool library offers a way to “get those things out of storage, and unlock their value.” So the next time you consider buying a sander for a one-time project, look into a tool library instead.
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked a Farm-Friendly Innovation