You’re Invited! HOOTENANNY Barn Dance Benefit for Grow Dat presented by the Louisiana Hospitality Foundation

Tickets on sale now!

ABOUT: Join us on Friday, April 17, 2015 from 6:30-10pm for our Barn Dance Benefit presented by the Louisiana Hospitality Foundation. This is an incredibly unique event that takes place at our farm and features music, dancing, dinner, and cocktails under the Louisiana night sky. As the largest urban farm in the city, located in heart of beloved City Park, we are proud to invite you to this fantastic annual party. Thanks to our beautiful, outdoor setting we have no capacity limit for the event, so bring your friends!

This year, square dancing with caller Dan Baker and free Zydeco instruction with Harold Bernard kicks off an evening of revelry on the farm. Performances by four-time Grammy nominee Cedric Watson, My Wife’s Hat and The Western Sweethearts will inspire revelers to kick up their heels. Premier local restaurants and chefs plan to cook up delightful small plates:

1,000 Figs
Centerplate
Drago’s Seafood Restaurant
Fulton Alley
Good Eggs
Mr. B’s Bistro
Mondo
Pagoda Cafe
St. James Cheese
SEED
Seither’s Seafood
Sodexho
Woody’s Fish Tacos

We will also offer craft cocktails, coffee specialties, and have ice-cold beer on hand. And last but not least, we are offering some very exciting silent auction items, including once in a lifetime vacation opportunities, unique art pieces, and other special surprises.

Tickets are $40 in advance online, or $50 at the door.

CULTIVATE FRIENDS AND SAVE! Make a $400 contribution and you’ll get 11 tickets (that’s 1 ticket free!) and you’ll also underwrite one comp ticket for a Grow Dat youth or community member.  Or, make a $200 donation and you’ll get 6 tickets (one ticket free!) and underwrite one comp ticket for a Grow Dat youth.

FEATURED SPONSORS:
The Goldring Family Foundation
Donna and Jim Barksdale

HARVESTER SPONSORS:
Anonymous
Cathy and Hunter Pierson

SPROUT SPONSORS:
Nancy and Mike Marsiglia
Amanda Hammack and Donald Link
Carol and Harold Asher
Dr Ryan Thibodaux and Second Line Family Dentistry
Tales of the Cocktail
iBERIABANK
New Orleans Magazine
Offbeat Magazine
Duplantier Ice Services

OUR HONORARY EVENT HOSTS INVITE YOU TO JOIN US!
Carol and Harold Asher, Cathy Pierson, Eve Troeh, Glen Armantrout, Councilman Jason Williams, Jennifer Kelley, Katy Casbarian, Margaret Orr, Nancy and Mike Marsiglia, Octavio Mantilla, Dr Ryan Thibodaux and Second Line Family Dentistry, Scott Cowen, Stephanie Stone and Ludovico Feoli, Susan Spicer, and Suzanne Mobley.

GROW DAT YOUNG ALUMNI HOSTS:  Ashley Morgan, Cody Watson, Geiby Gomez, Melanie Long, Storie Cook, Tim Dubuclet, Tre Spadoni, Valentina Carillo and Yasmin Davis.

HOOTENANNY PLANNING COMMITTEE:  Stephanie Barksdale (Chair), Jennifer Kelley (LHF), Jeanne Firth, Claire Alsup, Nellie Catzen, Willa Conway, Kathryn Conyers, Johanna Gilligan, Malliron Hodge, Sarah Howard, Marian Howorth, Stephanie Krell, Kristy Magner, Keelia O’Malley, Emily Posner, and Joshua Schoop.

ABOUT GROW DAT: The mission of the Grow Dat Youth Farm is to nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food. You can support these young adults who are growing food for New Orleans by joining us for the Grow Dat Hootenanny! Proceeds from this benefit will help us employ 40 teenagers to grow 12,000 pounds of food this year.

Hot off the Presses: Summer Quarterly Report

It’s the heat of the summer here in New Orleans — cool off by reading about all the successes of our fourth Leadership Program! Click here for the full report: Grow Dat Quarterly Report Summer 2014

Inside: Celebrating our fourth graduating class, Guest Chefs at our summer Community Lunches, Shout outs and Fundraising Successes, Youth Speak: graduates reflect on their growth and transformations, and preliminary evaluation data from our 2014 Leadership Program.

Notice our new look?

Since the start of the new year we’ve been working closely with the talented staff of Right Hat, a marketing and design firm that is proving $75,000 in pro bono work to Grow Dat to help streamline our look. Stay tuned for more beautifully designed products that feature our new logo.

An Unexpected Crop: Good Jobs for Youth

Founder and Director Johanna Gilligan released an op-ed in The Lens this morning on the importance and lasting impact of good food jobs.

“A strong stock market will do us no good if its foundation is an economy that further degrades the basis of the planet’s true wealth — its biodiversity, its water, air and soil. We have no choice but to see the links between our economic and environmental challenges and to address them as one.”

Read on here!

Press: Not Just Growing Gardens

Grow Dat Director Johanna Gilligan and mentor Greg Gale of VISIONS-Inc. & The Food Project in The Country Today.

Youth Speak: On Not Being Afraid to be Yourself

“I loved working with the people here. Everybody is open minded. No one is judgmental. No one is negative. Everyone is uplifting all the time and I love them for that. Everybody in my crew was supportive of me. They said ‘you are not afraid to be yourself’, and that’s what I think people here were like. Everyone could just be themselves.” -Youth Crew Member

Grow Dat creates a safe and rigorous environment that challenges young people while supporting them in their growth. Please join our Growing the Green alternative gift campaign to support our work.

Quarterly Update: Fall 2013

Hot off the press! For a detailed look at what’s been happening at Grow Dat this autumn, download our Fall 2013 Quarterly Update. There’s a big announcement inside you don’t want to miss!

Fall 2013 Quarterly Update

 

 

CANCELLED: Come meet our youth at the Fall Garden Festival in City Park this weekend!

We are sorry to announce that due to possible stormy conditions from Tropical Storm Karen, the Fall Garden Festival has been cancelled.

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Grow Dat youth will be presenting at the Urban Farm showcase at the New Orleans Botanical Garden’s Fall Garden Festival this Saturday and Sunday. Youth will give demonstrations in making a raise bed, planting the fall garden, composting, and urban chicken keeping (cluck, cluck!)

Simultaneously, youth will be offering free tours of our farm site and selling beautiful trees! Enjoy a  wonderful day in City Park by visiting both the festival and the farm.

Grow Dat Youth Farm Tree Sale and Farm Tours
Saturday, October 5 and Sunday October 6
10am – 5pm
Grow Dat Youth Farm site,
150 Zachary Taylor Dr. located between City Bark and Pan Am Stadium.

Youth interns will be leading tours of the farm and eco-campus, and will be selling native trees and shrubs to benefit the program.

Trees for sale:
Japanese Magnolia – $40
River birch – $40
Wax Myrtle – $30
Crepe Myrtle – $30
Viburnum – $20
Cherry Laurel – $20
Holly – $20
Inkberry – $20

Quarterly Update: Summer 2013

Hot off the press!  For a detailed look at what’s been happening at Grow Dat this summer, download our Summer 2013 Quarterly Update.

In five months, twenty-five graduates grew 8,000 pounds of food for New Orleans and earned over $17,000 in produce sales, exceeding our revenue goal for the third year in a row! Take a peek inside the report to see our preliminary evaluation data and hear youth voices about their growth throughout the program.

Grow Dat Quarterly Update Summer 2013

Click the link above to download the report.

Voices on Violence: Ties that Bind in City Park

This spring Renée Peck of NolaVie sat down with crew member Ashley Morgan and founding staff member Jeanne Firth to talk about the Mother’s Day parade shooting and gun violence: ‘Ties that Bind in City Park’.

The article is a beautiful rumination about the need to address our toughest social problems across the differences that can easily divide us. Learn about our Anti-Violence Summit and read youth reccomendations to the City on how to address violence here.

Quarterly Update: Spring 2013

Hot off the press! For a detailed look at what’s been happening at Grow Dat this spring, download our Spring 2013 Quarterly Update.

QuarterlyUpdateSpring2013

Click the link above to download the PDF for the inside scoop about our 2013 program so far

 

 

Spring has Sprung: Grow Dat Crew Newsletter, March 2013

Ariel Roland, Masters in Social Work at Tulane and serving as our Youth & Alumni Coordinator, crafts beautiful newsletters that youth share with their families and schools each month. We thought you might like a peek at them, too!

 

On NPR: Youth Farm Nutures Leaders

Real Talk: Muffin’s on the radio!

Eve Abrams, producer of 89.9 WWNO, spent last spring on our farm, following youth throughout our 5 month program. She put together a great audio piece that features one of our lovely second year Assistant Crew Leaders – Franchel Stevenson (known around here as Muffin).

Hope you enjoy listening to Muffin’s insights. Will you consider supporting other Assistant Crew Leaders through our Growing the Green campaign?

 

Youth Speak! Melanie reports back from her summer at Farm & Wilderness camp in Vermont

Melanie Long (right) and campers with freshly-harvested potatoes

My name is Melanie Long, I’m currently a Fall Intern at Grow Dat, and this is what I did this summer:

It started out with a blind leap into a state I couldn’t even place my finger on a map…Vermont. Plymouth, Vermont to be exact. I was to attend a work based summer camp for six weeks called Tamarack Farm, part of the Farm and Wilderness Camps. Beforehand, I was told that I would not have access to my cell phone or any other form of electricity for that matter so there would be no way for me to know what Liam and Hope were up to on the Bold and the Beautiful, my favorite soap opera. Anyway, I decided to not have any expectations about the farm when I arrived. This was a great idea, as I soon found out, because there were many many many new things that I was able to experience.

Grow Dat is an urban produce farm set in the heart of the city set right next to an overpass, but it is scenic none the less. Coming from this type of farm, it was totally new to live on a farm with both animals and produce, nestled in a valley surrounded by big green hills and a beautiful lake. The first big adventure I remember was nothing other than milking a cow. I love milk and personally knowing the cows that the farm’s milk supply came from was pretty eye opening! There were also chickens, ducks, calves (which act like puppies), goats and a ginormous (I cannot find any other words to describe her) pig. The pig was a sweetheart.

Up close and personal with the lovely dairy cow

The work projects were a pillar for the farm’s motto: Work is Love Made Visible. One of the major work projects which required about 40 percent of the campers was Barns and Gardens in which campers tended the farm’s garden and did various animal related tasks. Already having 5 months of farm knowledge under my belt, gardening was nothing new, and neither were some of the plants. Now this is very interesting because farms in the deep south, like Grow Dat, cannot plant many varieties all year round. Grow Dat stops growing cool weather plants like lettuce, radishes, carrots, and kales at the first sign of warm weather. Then Grow Dat plants hot weather plants like tomatoes, peppers, squash and okra. In short, we plant what we can while we can. Vermont’s climate, on the other hand, allows for all of these things to be grown at the same time during the summer. It’s not hot enough to wilt the leafy greens, nor is it cool enough to stop production of hot pepper plants. It’s amazing! I was introduced to different produce varieties like blue potatoes (see photo above if you don’t believe it), and was able to see how other things I eat grow, like snap peas and asparagus. (Honestly I didn’t start eating most vegetables until I got to Vermont. The cooks incorporated a vegetable from the farm into every meal we ate, and I enjoyed every morsel!)

Tamarack Farm Lodge

During the summer I hiked on the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains, covering 26 miles in 4 days. I milked cows, cooked for about 90, used a composting toilet, went off a rope swing into the lake, picked blueberries, tried new foods, played ultimate frisbee, built a shower house, constructed a bed railing, made bridges and doors, screen printed shirts, and made a beach with the rest of the camp one bucket of sand at a time.

I did all of these things this summer and even more that I can’t fit into this blog post!

Melanie hikes 26 miles on the Appalachian Trail in the White Mountains

Melanie Long graduated from Grow Dat’s core program in June 2012 and now works as an Intern on our farm. She is a Senior at De La Salle High School in New Orleans.