Washington, DC 2013
The DC Summer of Solutions project, Cultivating Intergenerational Leaders, is a summer intergenerational program in Washington, D.C., that will use the community food system as a tool to give youth and college students the opportunity to build life skills such as active learning, self-reliance, and healthy living.
This project seeks to create a more sustainable food system in DC by empowering those directly impacted by the negative effects of the industrial food system. The project leaders will facilitate a week-long leadership training for the college students to provide them with the necessary skills to facilitate an 8-week summer program and year-long after-school program for middle and high school youth. They will work towards linking sustainability, food justice and entrepreneurship in Washington, D.C. Recognizing the wisdom that the elderly have to share, the college students and youth will visit a senior home weekly for a community luncheon.
There will be three major components to this summer program:
1) field trips to take DC youth to community gardens, urban farms, and food banks,
2) community luncheons with senior citizens, and
3) skillshares and workshops incorporating food justice, entrepreneurship, gardening, and cooking.
Some groups that the DC Summer of Solutions project will work with include the college students, youth in Sasha Bruce Youthwork, Beet Street Gardens, senior homes, businesses such as Soul 57 and Zenful Bites, and grassroots projects such as the Healthy Affordable Food for All initiative. We aim to foster as much cross-cultural and intergenerational collaboration as possible to create a broad-base coalition of support to create a sustainable food system in Washington, DC.
The program leaders will be Jeremiah Lowery and Josephine Chu. Currently, Jeremiah Lowery is a Congressional Hunger Center fellow in Jackson, Mississippi. Prior to this fellowship, he organized low-income residents in the Washington, DC area to learn about nutrition, food preparation, and food budgeting. Josephine Chu is a MA student at American University and co-founder of Zenful Bites, a new DC-based company that provides healthy catering options for organizations as well as educates community members about healthy and sustainable food.
If you are inspired to get involved with this project, please email us at dcsolutionsproject@gmail.com or visit http://dcsolutionsproject.