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Dear Friends,
Well, you think the fireworks are over.... until you step into the FRESH Urban Farm and Education Center and feast your eyes on the riot of colors filling our growing spaces.
Happy summer, everyone! July is just getting started, but we hit the ground running (and sweating) as summer steps off with a bound (just to really mix metaphors here).
Our youth program started on Wednesday, and we harvested for the third CSA pick up date. The Farmer's Market starts on Friday and we have a workshop on Saturday. Every day brings new lessons, challenges and growing, glowing, gleaming gifts from the garden!
In this issue of the Newsletter, we have:
An Update from McDonald Park Rest in Peace, Christopher Coons
The Summer Youth Program: Getting Started
Recipe of the Month: Eat Raw Greens. They are really good for you! |
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| | McDonald Park Community Garden Update |
| | A picture is worth a thousands words! And shows a thousand blisters too!
The McDonald Park Community Garden is up and running. It is a busy and dynamic site-- with Summer Meals-- breakfast and lunch-- every week day (breakfast is at 9:45am and lunch comes at 12:45), Community Work Days every Wednesday (3-6pm) and Saturday (10-Noon).
And if that isn't enough activity for you, we have a Mid-Season Workshop scheduled for Saturday, July 8th at 10am. Join us for this introduction to mid-season preparation techniques: How to prune tomatoes, structure your plots, water and mulch to retain moisture as it gets hotter out. Master Gardeners and FRESH volunteers Liz Spurr and Tim Grimes will run this workshop and provide participants with helpful literature to take home. Come join us for this workshop and see the great work that the community has accomplished! A donation of $5 would be most appreciated to support FRESH and off-set costs.
Email info@freshnewlondon.org to RSVP. |
| | | REST IN PEACE, CHRISTOPHER COONS |
| | While McDonald Park Community Garden has been a site of activity and growth and community building this season, it has also been a site of tragedy.
Mr. Coons was a neighbor, a father and a son. He was a member of our community. He lived right up the street from the McDonald Park Community Garden. On Saturday, June 17th, he was found dead at the Community Garden. His family held a celebration of his life-- tragically cut short at the age of 30-- the following week at the Engaging Heaven Church downtown. His family is asking that those wishing to honor Mr. Coons make contributions to college funds set up for his children through the Connecticut Higher Education Trust (CHET). Donations may be made by using the code CTC3MMREQ at chetegift.ebilling.com.
We did not know Mr. Coons, but we are sure our paths crossed as volunteers, staff and youth associated with FRESH New London have been working with community members to transform McDonald Park into the Community Garden.
It is our sincere hope that our work to make the park more beautiful, vibrant, welcoming and wholesome will serve as a lasting memorial to Christopher Coons.
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| | | SUMMER YOUTH PROGRAM: UP AND RUNNING! |
| | Summer is in the air! The FRESH Youth Program kicked off this week. We have 14 young people from New London and the surrounding communities working with us for the summer. So far they have pulled weeds, seeded trays of Fall greens, engaged in lots of group building activities and hiked through the wilds of Waterford.
The young people remarked on the peacefulness of the woods, the beauty of butterflies, the ways in which being in nature helps you go back in time. Some got their first peek at a deer. So, on the front end it was all friendship and exploration.
The back end has been a little more challenging! Because of the uncertainty of the state budget and cuts in Hartford, our stipended Summer Youth program started with lot of question marks and confusion. As of this writing, we still aren’t sure what the Department of Youth Affairs, which provides wages for teenagers to work throughout our community, will be able to provide.
In years past, hundreds of teenagers have been employed through this great program. At one point, FRESH had as many as 15 youth staff paid through by funding stream. Usually, young people can work 75 hours over the summer months, earning $10.10 an hour, pumping thousands of dollars into youthful pockets and the local economy. This summer, if funding can be secured, it will be targeted to lower income youth and may be as few as 50 hours.
We salute the efforts of Cindy Alvarez and everyone in the Department of Youth Affairs for their advocacy and organizing to safeguard this invaluable program. And we hope it works out, but in the meantime, FRESH has prioritized summer wages for youth that were going to be hired through the Summer Youth Employment program. It took some finagling (and a lot of paperwork), but we have hired our young people and they are hard at work as this email goes out. We are going to need to fund-raise harder and stronger in the coming months to fill the gaps in the bare bones budget coming out of Hartford and Washington. So, watch this space and be ready to support wages and stipends and supports for our next generation of farmer-leaders.
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WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
Interested in supporting FRESH with a tax-deductible donation? Of course you are!! http://www.freshnewlondon.org/donate |
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