CitySprouts

CitySprouts is a school and community program that integrates academic, health and environmental education in the public schools and in the neighborhood. Working closely with school administrators, teachers and families, CitySprouts creates school gardens and provides essential support to schools as they extend existing curricula to these outdoor classrooms. CitySprouts’ school and community partnerships ensure that CitySprouts gardens are accessible to children during school, after school and in the summer.

Since 2000, CitySprouts has partnered with the Cambridge Public Schools to create a thriving, district-wide school garden program serving over 4,000 urban children, half of whom are low-income. CitySprouts program operates at all 12 (K-8th grade) schools in Cambridge, serving every child in the city.

CitySprouts is the only school garden program in the region that is collaborating with public schools to incorporate school gardens into the district science curriculum as well as providing a food and nutrition resource to the community.

CitySprouts summer internship gives youth hands-on experiences in healthy eating and environmental education. For four mornings a week over four weeks, the youth enrolled in CitySprouts summer program learn the skills to grow food, learn to prepare it, and to share their skills and knowledge with peers and family. Youths’ experience- in their own voices- is documented in a six minute video that can be viewed at CitySprouts website (www.citysprouts.org).

CitySprouts is partnered with The Food Project and Boston Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services in the Massachusetts FoodCorps Initiative. FoodCorps is an AmeriCorps initiative that places service members for one year at host sites in high-need communities throughout the country to improve children’s education about- and access to- healthy, locally grown food. The Massachusetts FoodCorps Initiative goals are to:

• Make school gardens accessible to children by incorporating school gardens in academic learning in public school settings
• Engage children and families in healthy lifestyle through learning about food and food systems, producing and eating fresh food and increasing knowledge of food and nutrition
• Increase access to and consumption of fresh produce among low-income school-aged children and their families in Boston and on the North Shore

CitySprouts implemented the CitySprouts school-year program (based on the Cambridge model) at the Veteran’s Memorial and Beeman elementary schools in Gloucester. We are currently working in two Boston Public Schools: Dearborn Middle School and Orchard Gardens K-8 Pilot School and two Lynn Public Schools: Ford School and Ingalls School. We plan to expand to two additional Boston public schools in the fall 2013.