The Mission of the Youth Farm and Market Project is to nurture relationships between urban youth and their families, their communities, and the earth around them by growing, cooking, eating and selling healthy food. Within our three main focus areas of Urban Agriculture, Youth Organizing and Cultural Nutrition, our goals are:

• To increase youth competencies and qualities needed to be successful in life and work
• To help youth develop public skills through community building projects
• To set youth on the road to lifelong health using local, traditional and cultural foods
• To provide high quality, culturally-appropriate foods for people in low income communities

We provide youth with experiences that will increase the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in life and work. Focus is on three areas of competency:

• Work ethic/self management (such as punctuality, reliability, and honesty)
• Personal qualities/team cohesiveness (including taking initiative, helping the group succeed, dealing effectively with conflict, valuing diversity, and being courteous to customers)
• Food production/marketing (growing and harvesting produce, cooking, nutrition, making and following a plan, tracking sales, and setting up displays).

We build community and ensure that youth are perceived as valuable community participants who can make meaningful public contributions. In our view, communities are healthy when physical and social environments are both challenging and life supporting. We structure our program to:

• Employ youth skills and talents to benefit the community by creating productive green space and providing affordable, culturally-appropriate produce to low-income residents
• Build a web of relationships with community organizations and institutions to support youth’s community building efforts and personal development
• Provide opportunities for youth to define for themselves the important issues in their communities and support their efforts to organize around these issues.

We engage our Youth Farmers as activists in making sure that traditional, cultural foods are represented in local food systems and available to both local youth and families. We provide high quality, culturally-appropriate foods in low income communities by:

• Growing traditional crops from different cultures on our farms
• Running weekly farmers’ markets to sell this produce in our neighborhoods
• Setting up Youth Farm “shares” with low-income families
• Working with local food shelves to distribute produce to low-income families.

We teach youth how to grow and prepare healthy, culturally-appropriate food; and connect with schools and other community organizations to build in experiences to teach the importance of food and nutrition to lifelong health. We set youth on the road to lifelong health by:

• Cooking with youth, emphasizing nutritious foods from different cultures
• Working with youth to plant, care for, and harvest produce from different countries
• Taking youth on field trips to farms, restaurants, and other businesses operated by different immigrant groups
• Teaching youth about culture through growing and preparing culturally appropriate foods
• Connecting with teachers and schools to build in opportunities to teach the importance of culturally appropriate foods and nutrition to lifelong health
• Finding elders from different cultures who will cook with our kids.