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| | | GROW FOOD. EMPOWER YOUTH. BUILD COMMUNITY.
FRESH New London is a small but mighty food justice non-profit. Our mission is to build momentum for food system change through local agriculture, community partnerships, and youth leadership training, in order to dismantle systemic oppression and ensure everyone has access to food with dignity.
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| | YOUTH LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT |
| 2024 Summer Youth Program Recap This year, we celebrate FRESH’s 20th year Anniversary! The 20 year mark is bringing with it welcomed change, transition, and new opportunities–which is largely reflected in our youth programming, most strongly exhibited by our team of 6 Jr. Staff. As in the Spring program, our youth-led programming team planned and executed the entire summer program alongside their managers, and played a huge role in the success of this season.
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| | The programming team was a part of the interview and hiring process, helped facilitate the parent orientation, and engaged in training for 2 seasons prior to the summer program. Using and adapting previous workshops we’ve done, as well as brainstorming new ones and rearranging their flow throughout the season, ensured that we touched on the core points needed to understand the connections between slavery, food, and revolution. They started by creating mini assessment maps of New London–what does our community have access to, and what do we wish we could add to it?
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| FRESH youth engaged in our annual ancestral diet workshop, which begins to inform why our communities are set up the way they are, and the whys behind the kind of food we have access to today, vs. before colonization. They explored the timeline of Black American history, especially as it pertains to the inception of our current food system within Chattel Slavery. We learned about the Black Panther Party’s movement to reclaim Black Power by using food as pathway, and how the FBI saw that as a direct threat to be dealt with. They shared and exchanged food stories with one another, and ended the program with a solution-based workshop aimed at helping folks come up with a plan to change something in their community.
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| The flow of all of these workshops, as well as the way they were intentionally structured to leave space for curiosity, conversation, and questions, ensured that the programming team met the goal of balancing issue-based conversations with solutions-based. If we are learning that our food system is broken, and on purpose, how will we change that? Our interns from Wesleyan U were instrumental in helping us format that last workshop, which helped young people clearly identify a problem, understand the people and stakeholders involved, and create a thorough plan that begins to address it. This is the start of organizing, and it will be where we begin, workshop-wise, this Fall.
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| | Summer Youth Program
FRESH New London's Summer Youth Program is a leadership development & community engagement program for youth aged 14-20. Participants learn about farming, the food system, and food justice while gaining skills in communication, advocacy, and leadership. Our youth are compensated while they learn, either through a FRESH stipend or via our partnership with New London Youth Affairs. |
| | | | Pests in your Garden
We all love our collards and cabbages, and that love can drive us to squash any suspicious things we find crawling on our plants. “Is this an egg that will hatch into a caterpillar who will eat my plants?” crush “Is this a cocoon of a moth that will lay eggs that will hatch into a caterpillar and eat my plants?” squish
The FRESH farm team had the opportunity to attend a pest management workshop offered at UConn, and it was very informative! They covered general practices for preventing bacterial and fungal diseases (as much as you can in organic systems): Your best friend is air and ventilation. Moisture is necessary for both the spread of bacteria and fungal diseases, so spacing and pruning your plants in a way that allows them to dry out after it rains goes a long way to slowing down these problems. The workshop then went into a deep dive into the identification of common cabbage worms.
There are two worms that are prevalent in New London: the imported cabbage worm that becomes the ubiquitous white cabbage butterfly, and the cross striped cabbage worm, which is actually much more destructive. Its adult form, a small brown moth, is much less iconic. But as we stress over the swiss cheese pattern that has been chewed onto our brassica plants, there is something else going on. An entire Netflix nature documentary is happening right in your garden.
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| Next to the cabbage worms that were eating our collards in the Mercer garden were tiny pupa that looked like little grains of rice made out of thread. They look suspicious, but they are not the eggs or a cocoon from our caterpillar pests! These are part of the life cycle of parasitic wasps.
Wasps in the genus Cotesia are tiny. They can’t hurt you, but they will lay their eggs inside the body of a caterpillar. Those eggs hatch and then eat that caterpillar from the inside before bursting out, creating a reenactment of Alien and helping you rid these pests from your garden at the same time.
So don’t squish those rice grains! The good news is, with a little practice, they’re very easy to identify:
Cross striped cabbage worm eggs are tiny, yellow, flat, and scaley: squish
Cross striped worms pupate underground: you won’t find them
Imported cabbage worm eggs are tiny, single, and translucent: squish (but very hard to see)
Imported cabbage worm pupa are ½ inch, angular, and green to brown: squish
Parasitic wasps have rice sized, fuzzy, solid, pupa. Some are singular and white and other are yellow and in clusters: let them be
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| | So how can you encourage these wasps to live in your garden?
Just like with pollinators, planting flowers provides a food source for your parasitic wasps. I recommended growing smaller flowers to match the needs of these small beneficial insects. You can grow carrot flowers, alyssum, asters, or zinnias. Another easy way to provide some food sources for these wasps is to let some of your vegetables go to flower, maybe leave those collards and other brassicas to bolt in the fall. Many beneficial insects also love the flowers of herbs such as dill and cilantro.
I am very glad that there are so many ways for FRESH and the farm team to add to our food growing knowledge and pass it on to this community. So next time you see caterpillar damage on your plants, see if you can also find signs of these easily overlooked (helpful) residents!
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| | PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN MARKET @ MERCER GARDEN
On June 22nd, FRESH opened our summer market to the community. This market is offered in collaboration with Connecticut College's garden club Sprout Garden. We grow a large variety of vegetables and herbs (and a few fruits), including collards, Caribbean peppers, squash, tomatoes, and more. Come shop for what you enjoy, and pay what works for your family. The market, which is open every Saturday from 10am - 12pm during the growing season, is an integral agricultural and learning program for our summer college interns and our Youth Crew program participants. |
| | | | The Racist Origins of Tipping Culture
In the United States, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour—the same it’s been for 15 years. But for employees who earn tips, the subminimum wage is $2.13 per hour.
Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved Black workers were often relegated to service jobs (e.g., food service workers and railroad porters). However, instead of paying Black workers, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services. The use of tipping to pay a worker’s base wage became an increasingly common practice for service sector employment.
Across the country, tipped workers are paid at least a third less than the median worker overall. Hispanic, Asian-American and Pacific Islander, foreign-born, and women workers are overrepresented in the tipped workforce, while white workers and men are underrepresented. The tipped workforce nationwide is nearly two-thirds women, and disproportionately composed of women of color.
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| | | | Youth Block Party We celebrated the end of our summer program with a block party at McDonald Park! Issa catering provided us with delicious Syrian food, and we had our Pay-What-You-Can Veggie Table, youth vendors and performances, a clothing swap, tabling by some of our local partners, youth-made merch for sale, and more. Thank you to everyone that came out to uplift our youth and our community!
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| | | | What Stewardship Means to Me:
Most people in New London know me for my work as the youth program manager at FRESH, and most people in the Bronx (where I'm originally from) know me for my work as a community organizer and an artist. My passions are vast, ranging from visual art & growing to feminine body sovereignty & education. Whatever it is I'm engaged in–which, these days, is Earth-based education and leadership development for young people (plus starting my own farm on the side)–I am doing it with the intention of creating something bigger than myself, that will outlast me, and will be to the benefit of our descendants.
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| To be a Land Steward, a Custodian of the Earth, or whatever you want to call it, is to listen to and work with the land because it is what we are here to do, not because it will benefit you. This wise teaching comes from the Great Haudenosaunee Law (Iroquois): "In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation." The deep wisdom of doing something for the betterment of 7 generations ahead of us calls us out of individualism and egotistical life pursuits. It places us as the catalyst for a change that will be someone else's joy–especially the historically colonized.
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| | The work that I do with our young people (it is my hope) will influence the way they raise up the next generation, whether as parents or just humans existing. I see my responsibility as giving them the tools to think critically about the world around them, to challenge and change systems, to reclaim their history and lineage through food or otherwise. That ripple will inevitably extend beyond them. When I was doing community composting in the Bronx at the height of the pandemic, it was with full knowledge that this would not change anything immediately…but that in the future we might be working toward a Bronx where everyone helps each other engage in closed-loop systems. The work that I am doing now to start Ceiba Arbor, my collective's farm in Salem, CT, is to carve out and reclaim a space for my descendants, and the 7th generation of Earth that they will be stewarding in turn.
Chloë Nuñez, Food Justice Educator photos by Jelani Ameer @jelani.ameer
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| | | | Doc Preston is one of the newest gardeners here at FRESH, but it feels like he has been with us for years! A conscientious gardener (his collards are going OFF), friend, and neighbor, he is both a steward of our community spaces and a super volunteer. We know that we can count on him - he shows up for workdays and celebrations alike with the same level of enthusiasm and joy, and has helped us secure some pretty great donations. Thank you for everything you do, Doc! We are so glad that you are party of our community! |
| | | Open to the public!
- "Pay-What-You-Can" Market - EVERY SATURDAY 10am - 12pm, Mercer St.
- Sept 7 - Work Day (Volunteers Welcomed) - Mercer St. Garden, 9am - 12pm
- Sept 14 - Work Day (Volunteers Welcomed) - McDonald Park, 9am - 12pm
- Sept 28 - Work Day (Volunteers Welcomed) - Mercer St. Garden, 9am - 12pm
Around Town Events! - Sept 14 - HYV's Power Takeback voter education series- 74 Garfield Ave, 3PM
- Sept 21 - People's Budget Coalition Gathering - All Souls UU Church, 1PM-3PM
- Sept 27 - HYV's Power Takeback voter education series - 74 Garfield Ave, 5:30PM
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| FRESH is fiscally sponsored by Third Sector New England, Inc (TSNE).
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Phone: 860-574-9006
P.O. Box 285 New London, CT 06320 |
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