2024 Teen Leadership After School Program Highlights

Thursday, May 16 marked the last day of the after-school program for our Teen Leadership Program. We wanted to take a moment to share some of the highlights from the past eight months and recognize all of the hard work done by our young food justice leaders!

Deepening Knowledge
The fall and winter are quieter months on the farm, but our teens were hard at work putting the farm to bed, learning to cook new recipes with our fall harvest (we loved the butternut squash soup), and deepening their knowledge about plants and food systems through workshops. A few fan-favorite workshops included plant families and intercropping lessons led by our Youth Programs Manager, Esha Biswas, and a food waste series led by our Teen and Schools Manager, Jenny Pritchett. Our teens are inspired by stories of Indigenous cooking, farming, and food system practices- some of our favorite documentaries on these topics included Seed: The Untold Story and Gather. They also participated in a corn nixtamalization workshop where they used dried corn from the farm and the ancient practice of nixtamalization to make fresh tortillas!

Community Engagement
Over the school year, the group participated in many different community engagement events. They did informative tabling events at YCS schools, the UMS Freight House events, and Growing Hope’s Earth Day celebration where they taught community members about native plants and how to make seed balls. They led two intergenerational cooking workshops at the Ypsi Senior Center where they partnered with local seniors to cook simple, nutritious meals! Growing Hope became a participant in the Neutral Zone’s Youth Driven Spaces Immersion Program, which is a year-long program that aids youth-serving agencies to increase youth voice, youth decision-making, and leadership in their programs and organizations. The teens have been learning facilitation and community-building skills, and Growing Hope adult staff have been learning how to include youth voices at every level of our organization. Through the Neutral Zone, the teens also designed and delivered a “ Sipping Self-care: Homemade Herbal Tea” workshop at the Youth Driven Spaces Conference, which was a huge success!

Seeding, planting, and growing
All the work our young people do is centered around our farm and growing food. Even in the dead of winter, they were learning about fungi and how to grow oyster mushrooms inside our farmhouse in buckets, thanks to Fungi Revival! Throughout the winter, the teens sorted and cataloged over 4,500 seed packets that were then donated to our friends at the Ypsi District Library for their Seed Library that is shared with the community! As spring approached, the teens began crop planning and seed starting for The Oasis and Sharing Gardens. They used crop planning techniques taught by our Farm Manager, Christopher. They learned how to soil block, direct sow, transplant seedlings, and how to plan and plant our garden beds! Their stewardship of The Oasis and Sharing Gardens will continue into the Summer Teen Leadership Program.

We are incredibly proud of this group of young people and grateful for their hard work, commitment to the community and the local food system, and the perspective and joy they bring to our organization! In June our current group of teens will be joined by seven new teen crew members for a summer full of learning, growing, and leading!

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Georgia Gilmore & The Club From Nowhere

By Julius Buzzard • February 18, 2026

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when formal fundraising was surveilled and criminalized, Georgia Gilmore organized something deceptively simple: a kitchen network . Known as The Club From Nowhere , Gilmore and other Black women sold pies, cakes, and home-cooked meals to quietly raise money for the movement. Their anonymity was protection. Their food was infrastructure. For over a year, as the boycott stretched on, these funds paid for carpools, gas, and daily survival. While history often centers on speeches and marches, Gilmore reminds us that revolutions are sustained behind the scenes by those who feed people, organize logistics, and keep the lights on. Her kitchen was a site of resistance. Her recipes were tools of liberation. At Growing Hope, we honor this lineage every time we invest in food entrepreneurs, incubator kitchens, and cooperative models. When food businesses are community-rooted, they do more than generate income; they fuel movements . Never underestimate what food can do. And never forget who has always been doing the work.

Fannie Lou Hamer & the Freedom Farm Cooperative

By Julius Buzzard • February 11, 2026

“If you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around.” Fannie Lou Hamer said this not as a metaphor, but as a lived experience. In 1969, after being evicted from her plantation home for registering to vote, Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi. The goal was simple and radical: Black families deserved land, food, housing, and economic independence, without having to ask permission. Freedom Farm grew vegetables, raised livestock, built homes, and supported cooperative ownership. It addressed hunger and poverty at their roots, refusing the lie that liberation could come without material security. Hamer understood what we still grapple with today: political rights mean little without food sovereignty . Voting doesn’t protect you from hunger. Legislation doesn’t replace land. Dignity requires access to the means of survival. This is why Growing Hope centers farming, education, and entrepreneurship together. Food sovereignty is not just about what’s on your plate; it’s about who controls the systems that decide who eats .

The Black Panther Party & Free Breakfast

By Julius Buzzard • February 4, 2026

In 1969, the Black Panther Party launched the Free Breakfast for Children Program , serving tens of thousands of children across the United States every single school day. Not as an act of charity, but as a declaration. The Panthers understood something the dominant systems refused to acknowledge: a hungry child cannot learn, organize, or imagine a future . Feeding children was a political act. It was protection. It was strategy. Volunteers cooked before dawn in church basements and community centers. Children were served breakfast while learning about Black history, self-determination, and collective responsibility. The state noticed and felt threatened. The FBI labeled the program “the greatest threat” to internal security, not because it was violent, but because it worked. And it worked so well that the U.S. government was forced to expand public school breakfast programs nationwide . Mutual aid didn’t just meet immediate needs; it reshaped public policy . This is food sovereignty in action: communities identifying harm, meeting their own needs with dignity, and building power in the process. At Growing Hope, we carry this legacy forward. When we insist on dignified access to food, when we support farmers markets as sites of connection and not extraction, when we center youth and Black leadership, we are walking a well-worn path. When communities feed themselves, systems change.

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