2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Growing North Minneapolis is an urban agriculture and youth development summer program sited in the North Minneapolis neighborhood. The program is a university-community partnership between faculty and community organizations including Project Sweetie Pie, Youth Resources, and NoMi Roots. We leverage resources from the City of Minneapolis Step-Up program to recruit, train and employ youth (14-15 years old) who face barriers to employment, particularly youth from low-income families, youth of color, youth from immigrant families, and youth with disabilities. Youth interns are placed in a 10-week long summer program and matched with undergraduate student mentors from the University of MN College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resource Sciences; and community garden stewards from the neighborhood. The student mentors and garden stewards work together to lead youth intern teams and work in multiple urban garden sites located in North Minneapolis, a designated low-resource community in the metro. One of our goals is to develop leadership experience for UMN undergraduate students and improve food and horticultural skills and attitudes among urban youth through garden-based education. Learning is experiential and contextualized in the various community garden sites as well as hands-on activities surrounding food justice, food accessibility, food production systems, horticulture science, aquaponics and composting. The experience was designed to develop interpersonal skills for both youth participants and UMN students including the ability to work in teams, communication skills, learning about oneself and others, and responsibility and leadership. We measured skills, knowledge, and attitude changes of youth that resulted from this experience over summer 2017 through quantitative and qualitative metrics. Quantitative metrics included a pre/post test assessing changes in garden-based and food knowledge and attitudes. Focus group sessions or interviews were held for each cohort. Results show that youth participants showed an increase in positive attitudes toward vegetable consumption, cooking, and confidence in gardening skills after the 10-week program.