“Kids making a future growing fresh food”
By Beth Connors-Manke
There was a guy who kept coming back. It was three times, I think. The first time he was considering if he’d buy anything. He had 35 guys to cook for, so only the big pile of collard greens would be in his ballpark. But it didn’t seem like he’d cooked greens before so they didn’t tempt him. As for the okra, green beans, mint, and potatoes, there weren’t enough on the table for that size dinner. (The entire lot of tomatoes had sold out to a neighbor up the street.) He walked away.
A few minutes later he was back. This time he just wanted to give a donation to the kids and ask more questions. What were they doing? How did it work?
This was a Saturday morning, there was a table full of just-harvested vegetables, but this wasn’t the Farmer’s Market downtown. This was 7th and Elm Tree, right next to the East 7th Street Center, the home of Kids Cafe. The growers and sellers were a group of young northside do-it-yourselfers, part of the S.E.E.D.S. program.
S.E.E.D.S., which stands for Service, Education, and Entrepreneurship in Downtown Spaces, is a program instigated by some northside middle-schoolers. Yes, instigated. Jodie Koch, who runs the program and is the program director of Kids Cafe, said she started S.E.E.D.S. because some kids kept, well, bugging her.
“The reason I wanted to start a program like this was because I had some middle-schoolers approach me, saying ‘I want to work for you this summer, how can I work for you? How can I make money?’” They were looking for work at Kids Cafe or with Jodie’s husband Ryan, mastermind and masterbrawn of Seedleaf.
But, the kids were mostly too young to legally work or participate in the city’s summer youth employment program. Being a knowledgeable do-it-yourselfer herself, Koch won a grant through Partners for Youth, which got the venture off the ground.
Here’s how it works: participants meet twice a week during the summer to create a business plan, grow and harvest at the group’s garden plots in the London Ferrell Community Garden, and sell their vegetables. If the kids are faithful and committed to the collective work, at the end of the summer they receive a stipend in the form of a $100 gift certificate.
Assessing the participants midway through the program, Koch said, “I don’t know how strong a motivation the $100 gift card is. I think that’s what gets them at first, but now that they’re actually into it, it seems like they enjoy the program.”
When I met up with the S.E.E.D.S. group at 9 AM this past Saturday morning, I didn’t sense any of the impatience that comes when people are simply doing a job to get some money. Andrew, Cristian, Dorcas, and Petra, the day’s crew, were there to harvest and try their hands at selling their produce for the first time. The discussions were all about what and how—what to harvest, how to display it, what to charge for the fresh food.
Most of this discussion was prompted by questions from Felice Salmon, who helps coordinate S.E.E.D.S. Salmon describes the curriculum of the program as a “learning initiative” and an “opportunity to follow the Socratic method of teaching. Giving the kids the opportunity to learn the foundational principles of a business, setting them off in the right direction and then their creativity and unique ideas get to be incorporated in what the garden becomes, what the business becomes.”
Perhaps one of the most important things Koch and Salmon are teaching the S.E.E.D.S. crew is how to utilize local resources. Cricket Press has designed the logo for the group. Local artist Luella Pavey has helped the kids with their signs. Marketing advice has been provided by Griffin Van Meter, and Becca Self helped S.E.E.D.S. put together a consumer survey.
One of the things northsiders know is that fresh produce can be hard to find on the north side—if you’re looking in stores. That reality helped spur the program, Koch said: “That was part of our thinking: fresh, affordable produce is not necessarily available in walking distance to most of the residents here. That’s part of the education and service piece: understanding what your community needs and then help your community get that.”
As for affordable, a vegetable lover could not have done better this Saturday morning. Since this was the first time S.E.E.D.S. was selling its produce, pricing was more an art than a science. The group decided to sell the food by the handful—usually 50 cents a handful. All told, the kids made $17 on their first day of selling: $14 from sale of vegetables and $3 from donations. They sold all but a final bundle of greens and some mint that had been purposely set aside to give to a neighbor.
I’m not sure why the guy came back to the table the third time, but I think it was because he liked and respected what the kids were doing. It was hard not to. In their green S.E.E.D.S. shirts, they were a group of quiet, focused kids who were doing something. Andrew and Cristian had washed and prepped the greens; Petra had made a sign announcing, “Kids making a future growing fresh food”; Dorcas was pounding the pavement selling the food to front porches on 7th Street.
The best part? People were buying.
Koch and Salmon have been teaching the S.E.E.D.S. participants how to utilize their resources, but best I could tell, these DIY kids already knew how to do that. They wanted to have a project over the summer so they went to an adult who could help make that happen. They put it in motion, and they’ll be the ones to keep it rolling.
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