Our Youth Leaders came out for their first volunteer day at the GSF/24th Street School last Saturday. It was simply awesome to see local high school students connecting with elementary school kids (and their parents!) in a nieghborhood school garden. Our Youth Leaders had never been in a garden nor harvested from one. They let the 24th Street Students show them their veggie beds and in turn shared their culinary skills to make a lunch of chicken noodle soup and garden fresh salad!
(Notice our new RootDown LA shirts looking stylie on Andreas, Ana and Mariella!!)
Three of RootDown LA's Youth Leaders had their first RDLA community work experience recently - cooking a healthy lunch for volunteers at WE CAN's neighborhood tree planting. On January 9th, WE CAN partnered with Tree People to plant 150 fruit trees in South LA. RootDown LA was there with fresh seasonal fruit and a white bean pasta salad whose name got too long when we tried to include all the ingredients in it. Three kinds of kale, three herbs, red onion confit (that's onions cooked in red wine vinegar, butter and sugar), feta and cotija cheeses, balsamic vinegar and sauteed garlic made it into the mix before we were through.
One guest was particularly thrilled we served a dish with no meat. The white beans gave the protein the volunteers needed to stay powered through the planting day!
This week we celebrated the end of our first formal RootDown LA Youth Leader training with the passing out of our new RootDown LA tee-shirts, "You're Gonna Wanna Eat Your Veggies." We also had a pot-luck feast of food made by students, parents and even grandparents! One student's grandparents brought us a gorgeous Bionico de Fresa! It was a lot of trial the past two months, only a little error, as we all got more familiar with our food systems, chef's knives, and cooking techniques for a bunch of veggies many of us previously thought were disgusting. We asked our students to write, after four 1.5 hour sessions with us, what they had learned. One student in particular captured so well, what we hoped they might learn: - that a whole food is healthier than a processed food - that many fruit are losing nutrients because they are injected with different chemicals - these chemicals don't only affect the flavor of the fruit but our organisms - it is valuable to teach others because we get informed of important issues not heard before that are important to us. Yes!
And, pics sometimes say more than all our words. So we'll let them speak about our little celebration this week. Thanks to: Jocelyn for the pasta salad; Guadalupe for the superior yet simple mashed potatoes; Mariela's mom, Narda for the pasta corn celery and carrot salad; Juli for ham sandwiches; Andres' mom, Martha, for her awesome chicken mole; Ana, whose mother, Juana made a giant fruit salad, and everyone else who kept putting out the delicious dishes for our gathering. Special thanks also to Keya and April who are our strongest proponents for the apple/cheese combo they've fallen in love with this year. Try it! They swear by this tasty snack.
We rely on grants and support from people like you to cover our annual costs. Today we're hoping for as little as $10 a visitor to help us reach our goal. Please donate!
