A Recipe for Community Health

With SNAP-Ed funding set to expire, Washtenaw County risks losing a low-cost, high-impact program that brought nutrition and joy into classrooms, parks, and farmers markets.

If you have a child in the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, you probably know about the “Healthy Schools, Healthy Communities” program. The program provides direct education to K-5 students throughout a five-week program, focusing on food education. Topics include learning about fruits and vegetables, the importance of physical activity, handwashing, honoring food traditions, and many other related subjects. The kids get excited about the Healthy Schools, Healthy Communities programming in a similar way to how they get excited about arts or music programming – a fun break from normal classroom routines, where they try something new.

Each session involves the kids using their bodies, using their brains, and using their mouths. It starts with a “fit bit,” engaging students’ bodies in fun exercise and “getting the wiggles out” before they settle into the brain portion of the day. The program has a special focus on literacy education, utilizing books about food and activities such as kids creating their own menus to reinforce reading, writing, and grammar skills — all while learning about food and nutrition. Finally, each lesson ends with a recipe-based, sensory-based tasting. This provides a fun, low-stakes opportunity to try new foods, allowing kids to use their mouths to explore new tastes.

What you may not know is that all of this programming is a result of SNAP-Ed funding–funding which has recently been drastically reduced, putting the continued existence of programs like these in peril. Danielle Dros is the program lead for SNAP-Ed programs in the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, and she shared with me the broad impact that the program has in the Washtenaw area. The Healthy Schools Healthy Communities program reached about 3,000 students in the area, across thirteen schools and 146 classrooms (in just the last year!). But that program is only one part of the program’s direct education initiatives (which in turn are only one part of the broader program).

In addition to the school year program, there is also a summer “rec connect” program, a physical activity-based program which operates at six sites, including Ypsi library branches and Ypsi Community Schools summer schools. The program is a game-based, six-lesson series that explores a different movement each week, such as hula hoops, jump ropes, or yoga. Each lesson also includes tastings, where students engage in activities such as trying three different kinds of apples and rating them based on their taste.

The last component of the direct education is their Farmers Market Food Navigator program, which partners with the Whitmore Lake Farmers Market every other Sunday. A SNAP-Ed staff member sets up and provides resources to help people understand how to sign up for SNAP, how to use their SNAP benefits, give out food samples, share recipes, and understand what’s in season and how to store produce. (If you’ve been following the other articles in this series, this is the same role that Cassian Lethe plays at the Ypsilanti Farmers Market.)

In addition to direct education initiatives, SNAP-Ed also works on community strategies (formerly known as policy, systems, and environmental change) and indirect education. Some of their work in community strategies has involved helping Whitmore Lake Farmers Market get a card reader to be able to accept SNAP (a major hurdle for small markets), partnering with Superior Township’s Fireman’s Park to improve an underutilized park space, revamping the Ypsi Community Schools wellness policy, partnering with local food pantries to use the Healthy Food Pantry Assessment Tool to evaluate what the pantries are doing well and where there is room for improvement, and supporting with community data collection for the new Ypsilanti Peace Neighborhood Resource Center.

In their partnership with Superior Township, SNAP-Ed staff provided the logistical support to help the township understand what the surrounding neighborhood would like to see in the park. In 2022 and 2023, they knocked on doors and took surveys. After collecting the data, they turned it into a visually appealing and easily readable report, which they provided to the parks and recreation department. The parks department was then able to use the report to ask the township to allocate more funds for the park renovation, and their advocacy was successful. As a result, in 2024, the parks department was able to add a younger kids playground, an older kids playground, benches, outdoor exercise equipment, and a walking trail.

This year, SNAP-Ed again partnered with the Superior Township parks department, as well as the township’s library, to create a story walk on the new walking trail. Story walks combine reading and physical activity by displaying a children’s book, page by page, along an outdoor path. All books used for the story walk are SNAP-Ed approved, allowing kids and their families to learn about healthy food while enhancing their literacy skills and enjoying quality time in nature.

The final component of SNAP-Ed’s community work is its indirect education programs. While direct educational programs focus on reaching kids in schools, the indirect education programs allow SNAP-Ed to have a presence in the community. They attend both school-based and community-based tabling events, such as the upcoming Annual Parkridge Summer Festival/Joe Dulin Community Day in Ypsilanti on August 23rd and the Kite and Rocket Day at Fireman’s Park. When they table, they offer tastings and recipes, information about the programming in schools, and fun swag. They also partner with the CSA Food Navigator Program to table during pickup times for the Argus Farm Stop and Farm at Trinity Health CSA boxes, providing a recipe that features the produce in the CSA box for that week and offering further information about the SNAP-Ed program. This, along with all of their other work, provides resources not only to people who are direct recipients of SNAP benefits, but also to all community members. Programs like SNAP-Ed benefit everyone, including individuals who may never realize they are benefiting from them.

At the end of our interview, Danielle shared that this article feels, in many ways, like a eulogy for the program. The current funding for the program only goes through September 30, 2025. After that, its existence is in peril unless the Michigan Fitness Foundation (which administers SNAP-Ed) can find an alternative source of funding for it. This is the kind of program where a very small dollar amount goes a long way, and Danielle still has hope that the state and/or other national organizations with vested interests in food access will step in to fill the funding gap. Hopefully, Danielle’s dream comes true, and we don’t lose such a valuable program forever.

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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Power of Farm to School

By Julius Buzzard • October 1, 2026

Beloved community, Autumn is, by far, my favorite season. Cooler days signal that it’s time to start buttoning up the farm as youth across our community settle into the rhythm of a new school year. This seasonal shift, the renewed rhythm, gives us the opportunity to reflect on our harvest while we simultaneously look forward to what’s next. And as we shift season, we get to celebrate National Farm to School Month! At Growing Hope, we celebrate, remember, and continue moving through each youth and school we intersect with because we believe it is instrumental in building a foundation of generational health on which our food system can grow. Farm to school impacts all of us. Every one of us is either in school, has been in school, or has someone close to us with a school experience. And for many of us, school is where our earliest beliefs about food took root. As a child, I relied on the school system for the majority of my meals. From a young age, I didn't know much about autonomy in what I ate. I knew the food pyramid, but not how the food served to me fit into it. In the end, it didn't matter. All that mattered was that it kept me from going hungry. This system built a foundation for how I thought about the food system, which included conflicting feelings of gratitude, shame, and survival. This is the experience of many youth in our community, and it's a big part of what drew me to Growing Hope. Our children deserve the absolute best we can afford them, not whatever is subsidized for the companies that can afford to send lobbyists to Washington. Whether it’s what counts as real food, who gets to eat well, or where food comes from. These are all deeply seeded beliefs that often stay with us our entire lives, and we cannot give up this narrow opportunity to shape them. We do this on two levels; first, experientially. Kids who plant, harvest, and cook stop seeing food as something that just appears, and start seeing themselves as part of making it. A few of the ways this has looked in practice include actively being involved in supporting school gardens across the district and helping to build up programs like RCTC Culinary Arts and Bakery Science and the new Botany Program. A couple of weeks ago, Jenny and Esha joined Grizzly X Day at Perry Early Learning Center, where we're starting a new garden club for 1st graders. The second is systemic. We invest in the systems that feed our children, because a garden club alone can't fix a cafeteria tray. Together, these two approaches are how a community builds generational health. In 2025, USDA canceled the Local Food for Schools program, which would have put nearly $18 million into the hands of Michigan farmers and schools. That's money that would have put Michigan-grown food in school lunchrooms. A bill introduced in Congress this summer, the Local Foods for Healthy Schools Act of 2026, would make local food funding for schools permanent. Again, we ask: are our school meal dollars going to serve local youth and local farmers, or the companies with the biggest lobbying budgets? Indigenous Peoples’ Day is also this month, and within it, an important reminder that this work did not begin with, nor is it owned by, any federal program. Indigenous peoples, including the Anishinaabe, who stewarded the land we farm today, were teaching children to grow, gather, and prepare food long before these programs came to be. This work continues today through organizations like First Nations Development Institute's Native Farm to School. That history isn't separate from what’s in front of a child today; Indigenous teaching has informed and built generations of farm-to-school work for all people. The Black Panther Party's free breakfast program and Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Cooperative are just two examples of communities coming together to feed their children when the system refused. We learn from that lineage, we tell their stories, and we steward school food systems that nourish our youth from the inside out. Every community's food system is shaped by what we teach and feed its young people. So we celebrate Farm to School Month by continuing to sow seeds of generational health in the minds and hearts of our young people. In solidarity, Julius P.S. Here are a few ways to get involved directly: request a field trip (you don't have to be a school), request school garden support , or fund free field trips for local youth through "Pay It Forward" on our auction .

Rematriation and Homecoming

By Julius Buzzard • September 1, 2026

Beloved Community, I've been thinking a lot about seeds and seed rematriation this season, and even more so as I sit with our bare seed libraries and seeds strewn about, drying for the season to come. Seed rematriation is the practice of returning ancestral and sacred seeds back to the Indigenous communities and lands from which they came. It's a deliberate departure from "repatriation." Through this lens, we are reminded that seeds are so much more than objects; they are relatives. And so, rematriation is not simply a transaction, but a homecoming. Over the past couple of seasons, our Teen Leaders have built a seed library in each of our spaces. These are places where community members can take seeds, plant them, and grow them, with the hope that they'll return the communal favor by collecting and bringing seeds back as the season turns. This simple practice reminds us that seed does not belong to any one person; we just happen to be its current stewards. Together, we foster a legacy that connects us with our ancestors who've walked before us and the stewards of the future who have not yet been dreamt up. Our Blue Hopi corn paints this very picture. It's a beautiful deep purple, drought-hardy and built by generations of farmers who knew the land intimately. At nearly six feet, it's impossible to miss; and every passing is a visual reminder of the people who stewarded these seeds, this land, and the dream that has become Growing Hope. Seeds hold our sustenance, hand down our recipes, protect our culture, and enshrine our stories. Over the past century, museums, universities, and policy have displaced peoples and seeds alike. This displacement attempts to overwrite the lessons learned by those indigenous to our land. It erases their stories. Rowen White puts it eloquently when she reflects on what she was taught by her elders: "the seeds are a reflection of the people." When a seed is scattered, something in the community is scattered too. And when it comes home, community comes home with it. Growing Hope's seed libraries are a small, local practice, not an extension of Indigenous seed rematriation. But the discipline underneath it, that what's entrusted to you is not yours to keep, is one we're trying to learn from and hold ourselves accountable to. The simple, yet powerful, act of returning a seed to the ground is one small way to practice that same discipline. We all carry things that were entrusted to us, but are not ours alone: a story, a recipe, a way of doing something. Passing them on is its own kind of seed saving. Maybe yours isn't a Blue Hopi corn stalk; it's the recipe your grandmother never wrote down, or a skill someone taught you that you haven't taught anyone yet. Saving these seeds, sharing these stories, is how we actively participate in a community market by reciprocity and shape the story of humanity. We're heading into the season built for this. The fall equinox lands on September 22 this year, and the Harvest Moon (also known as the Corn Moon) follows a few days later, on the 26th. This seasonal shift marks the turn Mother Earth asks us to notice: what comes next? Seed saving is simply paying attention to that question and writing down an answer. If you've never saved seed before, start small and let a plant or two go further than you normally would. Dry what you gather somewhere out of direct sun, store it in a cool, dry place, and label it (because you will not remember what that unlabeled envelope was next spring). Consider bringing them to one of our seed libraries and sharing them with our community of growers. Together, as we save seed, we help the natural world as a whole keep the core of its identity alive. We continue the cycle of nourishment, season after season. In solidarity, Julius P.S. Listen through some of the Ypsi Farmers & Gardeners Oral Histories to hear many of the stories our community is preserving collectively, and consider writing down and sharing your own. We all have a story to share, and collectively, our stories build freedom.

Teen Reflections: Nick & Sienna

August 13, 2026

Dear Growing Hope Community, August 6th marked the last day of our eight-week Summer Teen Leadership Program! Over the past eight weeks, 12 Ypsilanti teens joined us as part of our farm staff for an intensive summer program of farm work and workshops on food justice, community organizing, social identity, and cooking lessons. The teens worked hard this summer caring for their Oasis Garden, Children’s Garden, and the Sharing Garden, harvesting food for our free produce cooler, and partnering with local organizations to deepen their knowledge about the Washtenaw County food system. The Teen Leadership Program is an integral part of Growing Hope, and we are so proud of and grateful for this incredible group of young people! This Summer, we had two Teen Crew Leaders, Sienna Troy and Nick Corvera-Garay, and they worked incredibly hard building community among new teen crew members, leading teambuilders, and leading our social identity workshops every Wednesday. They have a few reflections on their time in the Teen Leadership Program that they would like to share. We are so proud of their work at Growing Hope and wish them all the best in their future endeavors as Sienna goes off to college and Nick continues on into the after school program and as our Staff Representative on the Growing Hope Board of Directors! Sienna Troy, Lincoln High School I’ve been at Growing Hope for three summers and unfortunately, I graduate from the program this year. I hate to leave, but I’m so grateful for the experiences I’ve had, the people I've met, and the knowledge I’ve gained. Growing Hope has gotten me more ready and prepared for life than any school ever will. I have learned how to be the best version of myself. If you asked me how I would describe myself my first year, I’d say introverted, quiet, and probably secluded. None of that describes who I am now. Working here has made me break out of my shell and create so many deep bonds. I have made so many friends and met so many new people who will forever have a special place in my heart. Growing Hope will be the only job I ever have where I’m excited to wake up in the morning and go to work. Being greeted every morning by beautiful flowers is such a special feeling especially when you’re the one who put the work into them. I even started my own garden using all the things I’ve learned. I loved taking in so much new knowledge during our workshops, so I could go home and tell everyone about it. There is so much passion flowing through me for the work we do and I’ll never be able to express how honored I am to be a part of it. I’m so grateful for all I’ve learned and even more thankful for Jenny and Esha for making this program as amazing as it is. I hope to take all the things I’ve learned here and pass it on. No matter how many years go by, Growing Hope will always be a part of who I am and what I want to represent. Growing Hope will always be a warm, welcoming, comfortable environment for me and I’m forever grateful for that. Nick Corvera-Garay, WAVE When I started at Growing Hope, I was in a very rough place in my life. I had been in and out of the hospital all year, I dropped out my freshman year, and I genuinely didn’t know what I was going to do with my future. I was struggling with my mental health, and I felt isolated from my peers. When I applied, I wasn’t expecting to get hired. Now, I am forever grateful that I was. Working here has been a life changing experience. I am now surrounded by people who love and support me in everything I do. I am surrounded by people who encourage me to be myself. I am surrounded by people who listen to my ideas, and take me seriously. At Growing Hope, I’m not just viewed as an intern. I’m viewed as someone who has valuable insight. Watching things grow around me– not just the plants, but the people, (myself included)– has shown me that there is hope for the future. It’s shown me that regardless of the conditions, the surrounding environment, whatever challenges life throws your way, you can grow. Even if someone comes and chews off all your leaves, you can be fruitful. (shout out to our soybean plants!) I’ve learned how to create meaningful change in my community, how to guide a team, how to keep fighting, and how to teach other people to do the same things. Even if I won't ever need to flip compost again, there’s a lesson to be learned about perseverance somewhere in between loaves of bread and orange peels. Both the people and the plants here have taught me things I wouldn’t have learned anywhere else. To me, this is more than a job, it’s a collection of lessons that I will carry with me throughout my entire lifetime. During my time here, I’ve accomplished many things. I helped plan garden beds, build a pond, paint murals around the farm, and last fall, I was elected to the Growing Hope Board as staff representative. I have been welcomed into this space from the beginning, and I am so glad to be in such an important part of this organization. Being the first teen elected to the board feels surreal, and it shows a change within the Growing Hope ecosystem I know we will continue on in the future. Trusting young people to lead and be in charge is important in any field of work, but especially food justice. We are the future, the torchbearers, the ones to create a brighter future. I am eternally grateful that the staff believed in my abilities, and I hope in the future, there are even more opportunities like this for young people like me. As I go into my third fall season, I can’t help but reminisce. Every year, so many people come into this program. I see myself in some of them, and I also see the ways they change and flourish here. I am honored to help guide and support these young people through their journeys. I believe this isn’t just a farm that grows food, but a place that helps our community grow, helps people grow into themselves, and helps us grow a brighter future. I now feel empowered to create change, to help everyone, and I feel that it is truly achievable. With the support of Growing Hope, I look forward to seeing all of the change the teens, myself included, create. I am eager for a brighter future, one that we will build together. I hope you, too, are eager. With love, Nick Corvera-Garay (PS: If you feel touched, empowered, or particularly generous- I’d deeply appreciate it if you considered donating to Growing Hope ! Your donations are matched through September, meaning anything you give will have double the impact. You can help teens like me feel empowered to create change, too.)

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