Food Justice: Grown Some Feed Many
Our Food Justice Mission
Food justice is the affirmation that everyone should have access to fresh affordable healthy and fairly grown food. Change the World Kids are working to strengthen a sustainable and socially responsible food system, which meets the needs of local people and their communities and respects the environment. For now, and for future generations.
We advocate for community-based ways of producing and distributing food in an affordable, equitable, sustainable, and environmentally-friendly manner. This will help promote good health, create local jobs, and emphasize the value of small, local farmers and markets. The choices and changes we make can have big benefits.
You – and every one of us – play a critical role in our local food system!
Food Justice Means:
Everyone has fresh, affordable, and healthy food regardless of class, race, gender, or sexuality.
Everyone has food security; healthy food should be easy to find and buy in small and large, rural and urban communities, whether no matter where you are on the economic scale from poor to wealthy.
Gardeners and farmers grow food with sustainable methods that are safe for our environment and practice good stewardship of our soils.
Gardeners, farmers, and other people who help provide our food, such as truck drivers, restaurant workers, and food market workers, are paid fair wages for their work.
Food workers have good working conditions.
Considering the health of future generations when we grow, purchase, or discard food.
Policy makers put in place legislation that promotes food justice.
Grow Some Feed Many!!!
Reduce hunger. Promote health. Build community. Change the World Kids launches our 2022 Grow Some Feed Many project, so we can deliver unprocessed, locally grown vegetables during the winter months to local Food Shelves and the Farm to School lunch programs. If many people contribute vegetables, we’ll fill our root cellar and dry storage area! Would you have any winter storage vegetables to donate, such as beets, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, garlic, onions, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, leeks, apples, pears, or winter squash? Or do you know someone who might want to help by contributing some of his or her harvest to help reduce local hunger and improve the nutrition? If you have questions, or want to schedule a drop-off time at our root cellar, please contact us: changetheworldkids@gmail.com.
Our Food Justice Gardens
We are making a difference in our local food system by working to reduce local hunger and promote food justice. Each year from our four gardens, we deliver over thousands of pounds of fresh vegetables to our local food shelf and food insecure families. We make weekly deliveries to ensure access to nutritious, healthy and local food. We engage farmers and gardeners and develop materials to educate community members in other towns to develop sustainable food systems in their areas.
In 2020 we converted totally to no till agriculture! Our Pomfret, Vermont gardens have 48 beds with rows of vegetables divided by 8’ deep paths of wood chips. Our new permanent growing beds use the soil building benefits of microorganisms to create deep humus, use the decomposition of annual mulch to increase soil fertility, sequester carbon while preserving soil structure, and ultimately result in higher production of more nutritious vegetables and a decrease in our carbon footprint! In our plots we grow fresh produce for our local food shelf and for families with whom we are working: beets, carrots, lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beans, peas, corn, cabbage, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, chard, celery, garlic, scallions, onions, turnips, rutabagas, melons, cucumbers, squash, and more. In July and August, we deliver over 100 pounds a week!
We grow 3 types of veggies: to fill tummies, to offer veggies that people consider expensive extras, to introduce and educate about less common vegetables and different ways to eat vegetables. In our Tasting Garden we encourage people to enjoy nibbles of familiar and unfamiliar foods, providing healthy and delicious snacks as fresh and nutritious as can be.
We network with community gardens. These are gardens on a plot or plots of land set aside for use of the urban, rural, or suburban community. Like the huge variety of vegetables and flowers that sprout from the thousands of rows and beds in these gardens across our planet, people from all walks of life grow in a wide variety of ways, as they till, sow, and harvest their crops.
Community gardens provide far more than food. They are about eating fresh and local vegetables that you grow yourself – or trade with your fellow gardener; reducing your carbon footprint; working outside and getting your hands into the dirt; and making new friends within your community.
Food Justice Education
We are proud to announce the completion of our Food Justice Activity Booklet that features dozens of games and activities introducing concepts of regenerative farming, seed to seed, vegetables, community, compost, pollinators and much more. With the generous support from local donors we were able to distribute the booklets along with seed packets to all of the area elementary schools! Along with the booklet, we created a short video to introduce Food Justice and the booklet.
If you are a teacher or parent who would like us to send you a copy or two, let us know! If you would like to download a PDF version of the booklet click here!!!
It all begins with an idea.
