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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When Food Is Weaponized

By Julius Buzzard • July 24, 2025

Standing for Krystal Clark and the Right to Eat

The wisest plans aren't drawn, they're grown.

By Julius Buzzard • July 1, 2025

Beloved Community, The solstice has turned, and with it, so have we; from spring’s promise to summer’s abundance. Here at Growing Hope, the gardens are bursting. Our new produce stand is packed to the brim, feeding our people. The Ypsilanti Farmers Market is an eruption of flavor, fragrance, and connection with lettuces that fan open like green flames and strawberries glistening red and warm from the sun. Inside the incubator kitchen, the hum of creativity rises. Local makers prepping for pop-ups across the county, building micro-enterprises from ancestral memory and modern hustle. And our Teen Leadership Program? Alive and electric. Twelve young visionaries are learning, leading, and laboring with heart. The farm pulses with their energy. As the land leans fully into the heat of summer, I find myself reflecting, not just on the harvest, but on the moment. The landscape around us is shifting fast. This moment has been described in many different ways, but we know the truth: this is a time of hope and possibility. Hope is not naïve. It’s an act of defiance. Of imagination. Of sovereignty. In complex times, the wisest plans aren't drawn, they're grown. Last month, I had the honor of testifying before the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Agriculture . I shared what you already know: Growing Hope doesn’t just run programs. We grow possibility. We practice emergence. We tend a living ecosystem of relationships. I told them: Each year, Growing Hope supports hundreds of backyard growers through our Home Vegetable Garden program. We provide raised beds, rich soil, seedlings, and the knowledge to grow a harvest that feeds families. These aren’t symbolic plots—they’re productive, generative, and abundant. And from them, we are witnessing the reweaving of a community food web—a quiet, powerful economy of mutual aid. Tomatoes for cucumbers. Collards on porches. Elders teaching youth to save seed. These gardens offer more than food. They offer belonging. They offer resilience. They offer infrastructure—the kind that actually holds when the shocks come. This isn’t charity. This is solidarity. It’s sovereignty. It’s survival. Together, we carry resilience. Together, we cultivate hope. Together, we are growing a hyper-local, sovereign, joyful food system; one garden, one porch, one plate at a time. In solidarity and soil, Julius P.S. The future of food assistance is uncertain ; we’re collecting stories to highlight the essential role that SNAP and other food assistance programs play in the Washtenaw County local food system. Keep an eye on our blog to learn more.

Innovating for Inclusion: Lessons from Old City Acres on Digital SNAP Access

By Julius Buzzard • June 27, 2025

Old City Acres, a Ypsilanti urban farm and food hub, is one of the only farms in the region individually accredited to accept SNAP. The farm is owned and run by Alex Ball, who has lived and farmed along the Huron River his entire life. Growing up in Southeast Michigan during The Great Recession, Alex knows that people’s financial and food security can be changed overnight, and has always understood the importance of SNAP programs for community food security. Old City Acres is primarily an e-grocer–they offer home delivery and multiple in-town pickup locations for produce, but all of the produce is purchased through their online portal. When they first started taking SNAP, the intent was to integrate more SNAP users into online CSA boxes and other produce sales. Alex worked with Taste the Local Difference, a Michigan-based local food marketing organization, to generally expand e-access for local food. However, they found that there is very little demand for online SNAP sales, largely because of a lack of awareness and training on the customer side. Despite his best efforts, Alex wasn’t able to break through that barrier for e-grocery SNAP use. Despite 20% of his sales being SNAP pre-pandemic, there was such little demand after moving online that he eventually stopped advertising about e-grocery SNAP and isn’t accepting new SNAP customers (though long-term customers are still able to use SNAP). Old City Acres spends more on just maintaining their SNAP infrastructure (the Bridge card reader) than they make in profit from SNAP sales, but have decided to keep their infrastructure because when they do have their pop-up, in-person, farm stand, there is still high demand for SNAP. Because of the struggle to transfer in-person SNAP use into the e-grocery space, Old City Acres has their own internal food access programs. They offer credit packages, where investing $75 or more into the farm gives you a bonus on each dollar you spend. They also offer no-interest payment plans on all of the credit packages, and there has been a surge in demand for this option over the past year. Finally, Old City Acres also offers a $10/week for an as-much-as-you-want option geared towards students and older community members, which people can access regardless of their official SNAP eligibility. These options help fill the gap left by a lack of e-grocery SNAP use, but they also put Old City Acres in a constant battle to maintain profitability, since they’re bearing the food assistance costs internally. The farm used to be much more access-focused, but according to Alex they have been left with no choice but to raise certain prices, which is difficult in an area where the customer base is so susceptible to even small price changes (about ⅓ of the customer base makes less than 50k in household income). This has left Old City Acres in the position of having to make tough decisions, not all of which help with community food access. The lack of SNAP awareness and use in small-scale e-grocery spaces highlights one of the limitations of current food assistance programs. This post is part of a series by Emma Rose Hardy, a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan and the Rackham Local Food Systems Intern at Growing Hope. The series aims to highlight the essential role that SNAP and other food assistance programs play in the Washtenaw County local food system.

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