Youth Education Program Expansion to Engage Spanish Speaking Youth & Families
Have you driven by the Redmond RootedHomes development lately? It’s buzzing with activity as the homes in the back of the RootedHomes community land trust site are starting to be framed up! We are excited to report our progress! While we continue to show up for family outreach events at Hugh Hartman Elementary School, Redmond School District’s Dual Language Magnet School around the corner from the future garden site, we’re building connections with staff to learn how we can best integrate future garden use with these students.
We showed up to a family holiday night back in December and got some insight into crops these students might be interested in growing through our art garden.
(Thank goodness it’s a sunny site, there was a lot of interest in watermelon!) When we returned for “Restaurant Night” we helped serve up some rice and beans to accompany the fresh student made corn tortillas and quesadillas. Kids wore chef hats and aprons, took orders, and served their families with pride at the meal they helped make. In preparing for this event they worked on 10 English Language Proficiency standards! We love it when teachers use creative food and garden based activities to engage learning in a hands-on way that meets their educational goals, and look forward to supporting events like this in the future by connecting it to foods they plant and harvest from the nearby learning garden!
The 19th Street Learning Garden, as we’re currently calling it, will be a Bilingual Learning Garden from the ground up. Hugh Hartman Elementary School is a dual language immersion school serving many Spanish speaking families, and students learning both English & Spanish. As this is a super power none of the current youth education staff possess, we’re really excited to be adding capacity with a Bilingual Youth Education Program Coordinator. Initially they will be working with students, staff and community members to help gather community input for the design of this future garden space. We will also be soliciting input from homeowners, as this will be a shared community garden that residents of Rooted at 19th will also have access to. We’re very excited about digging into this emerging community asset!
The new Bilingual Youth Education Program Coordinator will also be delivering our EarthSmart classroom presentations in schools and communities with a high number of Spanish speaking youth and families, as well as attending community events and doing outreach to share summer camp opportunities. We’re looking forward to being able to better connect with students and families that we weren’t adequately engaging in the past, and learning more about the ways their families and cultures practice sustainability.